thesis on values education

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Does teaching values improve the quality of education in primary schools?

This thesis has been undertaken to consider whether values education, as conceived in Palmer Primary School, improves the quality of educational provision. To do this, it explores the research question:

The research study seeks evidence to analyse whether moral education in positive values, in the form of values education, is fundamental to the purposes of developing quality education. Significantly...

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Values education and holistic learning: Updated research perspectives

2011, International Journal of Educational Research

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Value free research is a highly controversial and subjective proposition. Aspects including epistemological, ontological, and political issues make it very difficult to achieve neutral based research. Issues that cause educational research to be rated as inferior and second best include the fact that besides being criticized as being non cumulative, it is unrealistic and distant from practice. Educational researchers are also shackled by the dogma of unattainable ideality of neutrality and non-partisanship. In the attempt to imitate and fit in the deterministic and empirical ways of the natural sciences they disregard the uniqueness of their research.

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15 Values Education

Graham Oddie, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, Boulder

Published: 02 January 2010
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This article offers a metaphysical account of value as part of a general approach to values education. Value endorsements and their transmission are unavoidable in educational settings, as they are everywhere. The question, then, is not whether to teach values but which values to teach, in what contexts and how to teach them effectively. This article discusses the contestedness of value endorsements, the place for noncognitive value endorsements in education and the role of inculcating beliefs in education. The article also describes the rationalist and empiricist response problem of intrinsic motivation.

Moral education has received a great deal of attention in the philosophy of education. But morality is just one aspect of the evaluative, which embraces not just the deontic concepts—right, wrong, permissible, obligatory, supererogatory, and so on—but also the full range of concepts with evaluative content. This includes the so‐called thin evaluative concepts (e.g., good, bad, better, worst ); the thick evaluative concepts (e.g., courageous, compassionate, callous, elegant, cruel, charming, clumsy, humble, tendentious, witty, craven, generous, salacious, sexy, sarcastic, vindictive ); and the concepts that lie somewhere between the extremes of thick and thin (e.g., just, virtuous, sublime, vicious, beautiful ). Value, broadly construed to embrace the entire range of evaluative concepts, presents an educationist with some problems. Should values be part of the curriculum at all? If so, which values is it legitimate for educators to teach and how should they be taught?

1. The Contestedness of Value Endorsements

Philosophers disagree wildly about the metaphysics of value, its epistemological status, and the standing of various putative values. Given the heavily contested nature of value, as well as of the identity and weight of particular putative values, what business do we have teaching values? Perhaps we don't know enough about values to teach them (perhaps we don't know anything at all 1 ).

It might be objected to this argument against the teaching of values, from value's contestedness, that value theory is no different from, say, physics, biology, or even mathematics. There is much about these disciplines that is contested, but no one argues that that's a good reason to purge them from the curriculum. This comparison, however, is not totally convincing. True, philosophers of physics disagree over the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics, but there is little disagreement over its applications, its significance, or the necessity for students to master it. Similarly, even if there is disagreement over the foundations of mathematics or biology, few deny that we should give children a solid grounding in arithmetic or evolution.

The contestedness of value has been used to argue for a “fact/value” distinction that, when applied to educational contexts, leads to the injunction that teachers should stick to the “facts,” eschewing the promulgation of “value judgments.” Given the contestedness of values, an educator should pare her value endorsements down to their purely natural (nonevaluative) contents, indicating at most that, as a matter of personal preference, she takes a certain evaluative stance.

2. The Value Endorsements Informing the Educational Enterprise

Attempts to purge education of value endorsements are, of course, doomed. Value endorsements are not just pervasive, they are inevitable. The educational enterprise is about the transmission of knowledge and the skills necessary to acquire, extend, and improve knowledge. But what is knowledge—along with truth, understanding, depth, empirical adequacy, simplicity, coherence, completeness, and so on—if not a cognitive good or value? 2 And what is an improvement in knowledge if not an increase in cognitive value? Sometimes cognitive values are clearly instrumental—acquiring knowledge might help you become a physicist, a doctor, or an artist, say. But instrumental value is parasitic upon the intrinsic value of something else—here, knowledge of the world, relieving suffering, or creating things of beauty.

The enterprise of creating and transmitting knowledge is freighted with cognitive value, but episodes within the enterprise also express particular value endorsements. A curriculum, for example, is an endorsement of the value of attending to the items on the menu. It says, “ These are worth studying.” The practice of a discipline is laden with norms and values. To practice the discipline you have to learn how to do it well : to learn norms and values governing, inter alia, citing and acknowledging others who deserve it; honestly recording and relaying results; not forging, distorting, or suppressing data; humbly acknowledging known shortcomings; courageously, but not recklessly, taking cognitive risks; eschewing exaggeration of the virtues of a favored theory; having the integrity to pursue unwelcome consequences of discoveries. In mastering a discipline, one is inducted into a rich network of value endorsements.

The thesis of the separability of fact and value, and the associated bracketing of value endorsements, is not just tendentious (it precludes the possibility of facts about value) but also is so clearly unimplementable that it is perhaps puzzling that it has ever been taken entirely seriously. The educational enterprise is laden with value endorsements distinctive of the enterprise of knowledge and the transmission of those very endorsements to the next generation. Without the transmission of those values, our educational institutions would disappear. So, even if the value endorsements at the core of education are contested, the enterprise itself requires their endorsement and transmission.

3. The Place for Noncognitive Value Endorsements in Education

To what extent does the transmission of cognitive values commit us to the teaching of other values? It would be fallacious to infer that, in any educational setting, all and any values are on the table—that it is always permissible, or always obligatory, for a teacher to impart his value endorsements when those are irrelevant to the central aims of the discipline at hand. For certain value issues, a teacher may have no business promulgating his endorsements. For example, the values that inform physics don't render it desirable for a physicist to impart his views on abortion during a lab. Physicists typically have no expertise on that issue.

But it would be equally fallacious to infer that cognitive values are tightly sealed off from noncognitive values. Certain cognitive values, however integral to the enterprise of knowledge, are identical to values with wider application. Some I have already adverted to: honesty, courage, humility, integrity, and the like. These have different applications in different contexts, but it would be odd if values bearing the same names within and without the academy were distinct. So, in transmitting cognitive values, one is ipso facto involved in transmitting values that have wider application. 3 This doesn't imply that an honest researcher will be an honest spouse—she might lie about an affair. And an unscrupulous teacher might steal an idea from one of his students without being tempted to embezzle. People are inconsistent about the values on which they act, but these are the same values honored in the one context and dishonored in the other.

I have argued that there are cognitive values informing the educational enterprise that need to be endorsed and transmitted, and that these are identical to cognate values that have broader application. However, this doesn't exhaust the values that require attention in educational settings. There are disciplines—ethics, for example—in which the subject matter itself involves substantive value issues. In a course on the morality of abortion, for example, it would be impossible to avoid talking about the value of certain beings and the disvalue of ending their existence. Here, explicit attention must be paid to noncognitive values. There are other disciplines—the arts, for example—in which the point of education is to teach students to discern aesthetically valuable features, to develop evaluative frameworks to facilitate future investigations, and to produce valuable works. Within such disciplines it would be incredibly silly to avoid explicit evaluation.

4. The Role of Inculcating Beliefs in Education

Grant that there are noncognitive values, as well as cognitive values, at the core of certain disciplines. Still, given that there are radically conflicting views about these—the value of a human embryo, or the value of Duchamp's Fountain—shouldn't teachers steer clear of explicitly transmitting value endorsements? Here, at least, isn't it the teacher's responsibility to distance himself from his value endorsements and teach the subject in some “value‐neutral” way?

In contentious areas, teachers should obviously be honest and thorough in their treatment of the full range of conflicting arguments. Someone who thinks abortion is impermissible should give both Thomson's and Tooley's famous arguments for permissibility a full hearing. Someone who thinks abortion permissible should do the same for Marquis's. 4 However, even if some fact about value were known , there are still good reasons for teachers not to indoctrinate, precisely because inducing value knowledge is the aim of the course.

Value knowledge, like all knowledge, is not just a matter of having true beliefs. Knowledge is believing what is true for good reasons. To impart knowledge, one must cultivate the ability to embrace truths for good reasons. Students are overly impressed by the fact that their teachers have certain beliefs, and they are motivated to embrace such beliefs for that reason alone. So, it's easy for a teacher to impart favored beliefs, regardless of where the truth lies. A teacher will do a better job of imparting reasonable belief—and the critical skills that her students will need to pursue and possess knowledge—if she does not reveal overbearingly her beliefs. That's a common teaching strategy whatever the subject matter, not just value. 5

The appropriate educational strategy may appear to be derived from a separation of the evaluative from the non‐evaluative, but its motivation is quite different. It is because the aim of values education is value knowledge (which involves reasonable value beliefs) rather than mere value belief, that instructors should eschew indoctrination.

5. The Natural/Value Distinction Examined

In ethics and the arts, noncognitive values constitute the subject matter. But that isn't the norm. In many subject areas, values aren't the explicit subject matter. Despite this, in most disciplines it isn't clear where the subject itself ends and questions of value begin. Even granted a rigorous nonvalue/value distinction, for logical reasons there are, inevitably, claims that straddle the divide. It would be undesirable, perhaps impossible, to excise such claims from the educational environment.

Consider a concrete example. An evolutionary biologist is teaching a class on the evolutionary explanation of altruism. He argues that altruistic behavior is explicable as “selfishness” at the level of genes. His claim, although naturalistic, has implications for the value of altruistic acts. Suppose animals are genetically disposed to make greater sacrifices for those more closely genetically related to them than for those only distantly related, because such sacrifices help spread their genes. Suppose that the value of an altruistic sacrifice is partly a function of overcoming excessive self‐regard. It would follow that the value of some altruistic acts—those on behalf of close relatives—would be diminished. And that is a consequence properly classified as evaluative. Of course, this inference appeals to a proposition connecting value with the natural, but such propositions are pervasive and ineliminable.

Here is an argument for the unsustainability of a clean natural/value divide among propositions. A clean divide goes hand in glove with the Humean thesis that a purely evaluative claim cannot be validly inferred from purely natural claims, and vice versa. Let N be a purely natural claim and V a purely evaluative claim. Consider the conditional claim C : if N then V . Suppose C is a purely natural claim. Then from two purely natural claims ( N and C ) one could infer a purely evaluative claim V . Suppose instead that C is purely evaluative. The conjunction of two purely evaluative (natural) claims is itself purely evaluative (natural). Likewise, the negation of a purely evaluative (natural) proposition is itself purely evaluative (natural). 6 Consequently, not‐ N , like N , is purely natural, and so one could derive a purely evaluative claim ( C ) from a purely natural claim (not‐ N ). Alternatively, not‐ V , like V , is purely evaluative. So, one could derive a purely natural claim (not‐ N ) from two purely evaluative claims ( C and not‐ V ).

Propositions like C are natural‐value hybrids : they cannot be coherently assigned a place on either side of a sharp natural/value dichotomy. Hybrids are not just propositions that have both natural and evaluative content (like the thick evaluative attributes). Rather, their characteristic feature is that their content is not the conjunction of their purely natural and purely evaluative contents.

Hybrids are rife among the propositions in which we traffic. Jack believes Cheney unerringly condones what's good (i.e., Cheney condones X if and only if X is good), and Jill, that Cheney unerringly condones what's not good. Neither Jack nor Jill knows that Cheney has condoned the waterboarding of suspected terrorists. As it happens, both are undecided on the question of the value of waterboarding suspected terrorists. They don't disagree on any purely natural fact (neither knows what Cheney condoned); nor do they disagree on any purely evaluative fact (neither knows whether condoning waterboarding is good). They disagree on this: Cheney condones waterboarding suspected terrorists if and only if condoning such is good . Suppose both come to learn the purely natural fact that Cheney condones waterboarding. They will deduce from their beliefs conflicting, purely evaluative conclusions: Jack that condoning waterboarding is good; Jill that condoning waterboarding is not good. So, given that folk endorse rival hybrid propositions, settling a purely natural fact will impact the value endorsements of the participants differentially because natural facts and value endorsements are entangled via a rich set of hybrids.

I don't deny that there are purely natural or purely evaluative claims, nor that certain claims can be disentangled into their pure components. I am arguing that there are hybrids—propositions that are not equivalent to the conjunction of their natural and evaluative components. The fact that we all endorse hybrid claims means that learning something purely natural will often exert rational pressure on evaluative judgments (and vice versa). An education in the purely natural sciences may thus necessitate a reevaluation of values; and an education in values may necessitate a rethinking of purely natural beliefs.

6. Intrinsically Motivating Facts and the Queerness of Knowledge of Value

I have argued that natural and evaluative endorsements cannot be neatly disentangled in an educational setting for purely logical reasons. Still, it's problematic to embrace teaching a subject unless we have a body of knowledge . For there to be value knowledge there must be knowable truths about value. A common objection to these is that they would be very queer —unlike anything else that we are familiar with in the universe.

The queerness of knowable value facts can be elicited by considering their impact on motivation. Purely natural facts are motivationally inert. For example, becoming acquainted with the fact that this glass contains potable water (or a lethal dose of poison) does not by itself necessarily motivate me to drink (or refrain from drinking). Only in combination with an antecedent desire on my part (to quench my thirst, or to commit suicide) does this purely natural fact provide me with a motivation. A purely evaluative fact would, however, be different. Suppose it's a fact that the best thing for me to do now would be to drink potable water, and that I know that fact. Then it would be very odd for me to say, “I know that drinking potable water would be the best thing for me to do now, but I am totally unmoved to do so.” One explanation of this oddness is that knowledge of a value fact entails a corresponding desire: value facts necessarily motivate those who become acoquainted with them.

Why would this intrinsic power to motivate be queer rather than simply interesting ? The reason is that beliefs and desires seem logically independent—having a certain set of beliefs does not entail the having of any particular desires. Beliefs about value would violate this apparent independence. Believing that something is good would entail having a corresponding desire . Additionally, simply by virtue of imparting to your student a value belief you would thereby instill in him the corresponding motivation to act. How can mere belief necessitate a desire? Believing something good is one thing; desiring it is something else.

One response to the queerness objection is to reject the idea that knowing an evaluative fact necessarily motivates. Let's suppose, with Hume, that beliefs without desires are powerless to motivate. A person may well have a contingent independent desire to do what he believes to be good, and once he becomes acquainted with a good he may, contingently, be motivated to pursue it. But no mere belief, in isolation from such an antecedent desire, can motivate. That sits more easily with the frequent gap between what values we espouse and how we actually behave.

This Humean view would escape the mysteries of intrinsic motivation, but would present the educationist with a different problem. What is the point of attempting to induce true value beliefs if there is no necessary connection between value beliefs and motivations? If inducing true evaluative beliefs is the goal of values education, and evaluative beliefs have no such connection with desires, then one might successfully teach a psychopath correct values, but his education would make him no more likely to choose the good. His acquisition of the correct value beliefs , coupled with his total indifference to the good, might just equip him to make his psychopathic adventures more effectively evil.

There are two traditions in moral education that can be construed as different responses to the problem of intrinsic motivation. There is the formal, rationalist tradition according to which the ultimate questions of what to do are a matter of reason, or rational coherence in the body of evaluative judgments. But there is a corresponding empiricist tradition, according to which there is a source of empirical data about value, something which also supplies the appropriate motivation to act.

7. The Rationalist Response to the Problem of Intrinsic Motivation

Kant famously espoused the principle of universalizability: that a moral judgment is legitimate only if one can consistently will a corresponding universal maxim. 7 A judgment fails the test if willing the corresponding maxim involves willing conditions that make it impossible to apply the maxim. Cheating to gain an unfair advantage is wrong, on this account, because one cannot rationally will that everyone cheat to gain an unfair advantage. To be able to gain an unfair advantage by cheating, others have to play by the rules. So, cheating involves a violation of reason. If this idea can be generalized, and value grounded in reason, then perhaps we don't need to posit queer value facts (that cheating is bad , say) that mysteriously impact our desires upon acquaintance. Value would reduce to nonmysterious facts about rationality.

This rationalist approach, broadly construed, informs a range of educational value theories—for example, those of Hare and Kohlberg, as well as of the “values clarification” theorists. 8 They share the idea that values education is not a matter of teaching substantive value judgments but, rather, of teaching constraints of rationality, like those of logic, critical thinking, and universalizability. They differ in the extent to which they think rational constraints yield substantive evaluative content. Kant apparently held that universalizability settles our moral obligations. Others, like Hare, held that universalizability settles some issues (some moral judgments are just inconsistent with universalizability) while leaving open a range of coherent moral stances, any of which is just as consistent with reason as another. What's attractive about the rationalist tradition is that it limits the explicit teaching of value content to the purely cognitive values demanded by reason alone—those already embedded in the educational enterprise—without invoking additional problematic value facts.

There are two problems with rationalism. First, despite the initial appearance, it too presupposes evaluative facts. If cognitive values necessarily motivate—for example, learning that a maxim is inconsistent necessarily induces an aversion to acting on it—then the queerness objection kicks in. And if cognitive values don't necessarily motivate, then there will be the familiar disconnect between acquaintance with value and motivation.

Second, rational constraints, including even universalizability, leave open a vast range of substantive positions on value. A Kantian's inviolable moral principle—it is always wrong intentionally to kill an innocent person, say—may satisfy universalizability. But so, too, does the act‐utilitarian's injunction to always and everywhere maximize value. If killing innocent people is bad, then it is better to kill one innocent person to prevent a larger number being killed than it is to refrain from killing the one and allowing the others to be killed. The nihilist says it doesn't matter how many people you kill, and this, too, satisfies universalizability. The radical divergence in the recommendation of sundry universalizable theories suggests that rational constraints are too weak to supply substantive evaluative content. Reason leaves open a vast space of mutually incompatible evaluative schemes.

8. The Empiricist Response to the Problem of Intrinsic Motivation

To help weed out some of these consistent but mutually incompatible evaluative schemes, value empiricists posit an additional source of data about value. They argue that detecting value is not a matter of the head, but rather a matter of the heart—of feeling, emotion, affect, or desire. It involves responding appropriately to the value of things in some way that is not purely cognitive. Many value theorists whose theories are otherwise quite different (Aristotle, Hume, Brentano, and Meinong, and their contemporary heirs) have embraced variants of this idea. 9

Different value empiricists espouse different metaphysical accounts of value, from strongly idealist accounts (according to which values depend on our actual value responses) to robustly realist accounts (according to which values are independent of our actual responses). What they share is the denial that grasping value is a purely cognitive matter. Responses to value involve something like experience or perception. That is to say, things seem to us more or less valuable, these value‐seemings are analogous to perceptual seemings rather than to beliefs, and value‐seemings involve a motivational component, something desire‐like.

What, then, are these experiences of value, these value‐seemings? According to the Austrian value theorists (Meinong and his descendents), evaluative experiences are emotions. So, for example, anger is the emotional presentation of, or appropriate emotional response to, injustice; shame is the appropriate emotional response to what is shameful; sadness to the sad, and so on. Emotions are complex states that are necessarily connected with value judgments, but also with desires and nonevaluative beliefs. A much sparser theory of value experiences identifies them simply with desires. 10 That is to say, to desire P is just for P to seem good to me. To desire P is not to judge that P is good, or to believe that P is good. Something might well seem good to me (I desire it) even though I do not believe that it is good. Indeed, I might well know that it is not good (just as a rose I know to be white may appear to be pink to me). Value‐seemings, whatever their nature, would provide the necessary empirical grounding for beliefs about value, while also providing the link between acquaintance with value and the corresponding motivations.

Imagine if you were taught the axiomatic structure of Newtonian mechanics without ever doing an actual experiment, or even being informed what results any such experiment would yield in the actual world. You might well come to know all there is to know about Newtonian mechanics, as a body of theory, without having any idea whether the actual world is Newtonian. But, then, why should you prefer Newton's theory to, say, Aristotle's, as an account of the truth? According to the value empiricist, values taught entirely as matters of reason alone would be similarly empty. By contrast, if value judgments have to be justified ultimately by appeal to some shared value data, and the value data consist of value experiences, then the job of a value educator would be, at least in part, to connect the correct evaluative judgments in the appropriate way with actual experiences of value.

9. The Theory‐Ladenness of Value Data and Critical Empiricism

If pure rationalism seems empty of content, then pure empiricism seems correspondingly blind. Notoriously, people experience very different responses to putative values. Indeed, the highly variable nature of our value responses is the root of the contestedness of value, and it is often the major premise in an argument to the effect that either there is no such thing as value or, if there is, it cannot be reliably detected. If values education goes radically empiricist, and experiences of value (affect, emotion, desire, etc.) are the empirical arbiters of value, then an uncriticizable subjectivism, or at best relativism, looms, and the teaching of values would amount to little more than the teacher, like a television reporter, eliciting from her students how they feel.

This criticism presupposes a rather naive version of empiricism, according to which experience is a matter of passively receiving theory‐neutral data that are then generalized into something like a value theory. A more promising model is provided by some variant of critical rationalism. Perceptual experiences are rarely a matter of passively receiving “theory‐neutral” data, as a prelude to theorizing but, rather, are themselves informed and guided by theory. Even if there is a core to perceptual experience that is relatively immune to influence from background theory, the information that one gains from experience is partly a function of such theory. An experience in total isolation from other experiences to which it is connected by a theory rarely conveys significant information. If someone who knows no physics is asked to report what he sees in the cloud chamber, say, then what he reports will likely be very thin indeed and hardly a basis for grasping the nature of matter. So, enabling folk to have the right kinds of experiences—informative and contentful—which can then be appropriately interpreted and taken up into a web of belief, is in part a matter of teaching them a relevant background theory that makes sense of those experiences. This might be more accurately called a critical empiricist approach.

Given value experiences, and a critical empiricist approach to knowledge of value, values education would be, in part, a matter of cultivating appropriate experiential responses to various values; in part, a matter of refining and honing such responses; and in part, a matter of providing a framework that supports those responses and that can be challenged and revised in the light of further value experiences. Further, if experiences of value are a matter of emotion, feeling, or desire, values education would need to take seriously the training of folk in having, interpreting, and refining appropriate emotions, feelings, and desires. This would not in any way diminish the crucial role of logic, critical thinking, and rational constraints like universalizability. But it would open up the educational domain to cultivation and refinement of affective and conative states.

10. The Agent‐Neutrality of Value and the Relativity of Value Experiences

The hypothesis of the theory‐ladenness of experience is, unfortunately, insufficient to defuse the problem of the radical relativity in value experiences. Compare value experiences with ordinary perception. It is rare for a rose to appear to one person to be red and to another blue. But it is not at all rare for one and the same state of affairs to seem very good to one person and seem very bad to another. If these radical differences in value experiences are to be attributed simply to differences in the value beliefs that people hold, then value experiences are too corrupted to be of any use. Experiences too heavily laden with theory cease to be a reliable source of data for challenging and revising beliefs.

This problem can be sharpened by a combination of an idea endorsed by many empiricist value theorists (namely, that value is not what is desired in fact, but what it would be fitting or appropriate to desire), with a popular idea endorsed by most rationalist value theorists (namely, the agent‐neutrality of real value). The fitting‐response thesis says that something is valuable just to the extent that it is appropriate or fitting to experience it as having that value. The agent‐neutrality of value thesis says that the actual value of a state or property is not relative to persons or point of view. So if something—a severe pain, say—has a certain disvalue, then it has that disvalue regardless of whose pain it is. It is bad, as it were, irrespective of its locus. These theses combined imply the agent‐neutrality of the fitting response to value . If a state possesses a certain value, then it possesses that regardless of its locus. And a certain response to that value is fitting regardless of the relation of a valuer to the locus of the value. Consequently, the fitting response must be exactly the same response for any valuer. So ideally, two individuals, no matter what their relation to something of value, should respond to that value in exactly the same manner. The responses of the person whose responses are fitting are thus isomorphic to value, irrespective of the situation of that person or her relation to the value in question. Call this consequence of fitting‐response and agent‐neutrality, the isomorphic‐response thesis .

Now, quite independent of the issue of theory‐ladenness, the isomorphic‐response thesis seems very implausible. Suppose that the appropriate response to valuable states of affairs is desire, and the more valuable a state of affairs, the more one should desire it. Then, the isomorphic‐response thesis entails that any two individuals should desire all and only the same states to exactly the same degree. But clearly the states of affairs that people desire differ radically. Consequently, either we are all severely defective experiencers of value or one of the two theses that jointly entail the isomorphic‐response thesis is false.

11. The Effects of Perspective, Shape, and Orientation on Perception

The fitting‐response thesis looks implausible if value experiences are analogous to perceptual experiences. There is an objective state of the world that is perceiver‐neutral, but perceivers have very different experiences of the world depending on how they are situated within it. First, there are perspectival effects: the farther away an object is, the smaller it will appear relative to objects close by, and that is entirely appropriate; objects should look smaller the farther away they are. Is there an analogue of distance in value space, and an analogue to perspective? If so, something might, appropriately, seem to be of different value depending on how far it is located from different valuers. Second, there are variable perceptual effects owing to the shape of objects and their orientation to the perceiver. An asymmetric object, like a coin, looks round from one direction but flat from another; but again, it should look those different ways. Is there anything in the domain of value analogous to shape and orientation?

Grant that pain is bad and that qualitatively identical pains are ( ceteris paribus ) equally bad. I am averse to the pain I am currently experiencing—it seems very bad to me. However, an exactly similar pain I experienced twenty years ago does not elicit such a strong aversion from me now. Nor does the similar pain I believe I will face in twenty years' time. I can have very different aversive responses to various pains, all of which are equally bad, and those different responses do seem fitting. The temporally distant pains are just further away, in value space, from me now. Time can, thus, be thought of as one dimension in value space that affects how values should be experienced.

Some people are close to me, and the pain of those close to me matters more to me than pain experienced by distant beings. If my wife is in severe pain, that appears much worse to me than if some stranger is in severe pain; and that response, too, seems appropriate. I know, of course, that my loved ones are no more valuable than those strangers, and I am not saying I shouldn't care at all about the stranger's pain. Clearly, the stranger's pain is bad—just as bad as my wife's pain—and I am somewhat averse to it as well. But suppose I can afford only one dose of morphine, and I can give it to my wife or have it FedExed to the stranger. Would it be inappropriate of me to unhesitatingly give it to my wife? Hardly. Someone who tossed a coin to decide where the morphine should be directed would be considered lacking normal human feelings. Persons are located at various distances from me, and since persons are loci of valuable states, those states inherit their positions in value space, and their distances from me, from their locus. And it seems appropriate to respond more vividly to states that are close than to those that are more distant.

Finally, we can think of possibility—perhaps measured by probability—as a dimension of value. Imagine this current and awful pain multiplied in length enormously. If hell exists and God condemns unbelievers to hell, then I am going to experience something like this for a very, very long time. That prospect is much worse than my current fleeting pain. And yet I am strangely unmoved by this prospect. Why? Because it seems very improbable to me. First, it seems improbable, given the unnecessary suffering in the world, that God exists. And if, despite appearances, a Perfect Being really exists, it seems improbable She would run a postmortem torture chamber for unbelievers. So, extremely bad states that are remote in probability space elicit less vivid responses than less bad states that have a higher probability of actualization. And that, too, seems fitting.

Of course, one might argue that these things should not appear this way to me, that the same pain merits the same response wherever it is located. But that's just implausible. As a human being, with various attachments, deep connections with particular others, and a limited capacity to care, it would be impossible for me to respond in a totally agent‐neutral way to all pain whatever its locus: the pain of total strangers; pains past, present, and future; and pains actual as well as remotely possible. It would also be bizarre if one were required to randomly allocate one's limited stock of care regardless of the distance of the bearers of such pains. So, if a value that is closer should appear closer, and desires and aversions are appearances of value, then it is entirely fitting that desires and aversions be more sensitive to closely located values than to distantly located values. 11

Distance is not the only factor affecting value perception. A valuer's orientation to something of value (or disvalue) may also affect perception. Take a variant of Nozick's famous case of past and future pain. You have to undergo an operation for which it would be dangerous to use analgesics. The surgeon tells you that on the eighth day of the month you will go into the hospital and on the morning of the ninth, you will be administered a combination of drugs that will paralyze you during the operation, scheduled for later that day, and subsequently cause you to forget the experiences you will have during the operation, including all the dreadful pain. You wake up in hospital, and you don't know what day it is. If it is the tenth, the operation was yesterday and the operation was twelve hours ago. If it is morning of the ninth, then you have yet to undergo the operation in twelve hours' time. So, depending on which of these is true, you are twelve hours away from the pain. Both are equally likely, given your information. You are equidistant from these two painful possibilities in both temporal space and probability space. You are, however, much more averse to the 50 percent probability of the future as yet‐unexperienced pain than to the 50 percent probability that the pain is now past. This asymmetric response seems appropriate. We are differently oriented toward past and future disvalues, and that can make a difference how bad those disvalues seem.

What about the shape of value, and the effect of shape together with orientation on perception? Should the value of one and the same situation be experienced by folk differently if they are differently oriented with respect to it? Suppose that a retributive theory of justice is correct, and that in certain cases wrongdoers ought to be punished for their wrongdoing; that such punishment is some sort of suffering; and that the punishment restores justice to the victim. The suffering inflicted on the wrongdoer is, then, from the agent‐neutral viewpoint, a good thing. Consider three people differently, related to the wrongdoer's receiving his just deserts: the wrongdoer himself, the wrongdoer's victim, and some bystander. It is fitting for the victim to welcome the fact that the wrongdoer is getting his just deserts. A neutral bystander will typically not feel as strongly about the punishment as the victim does, but provided she recognizes that the deserts are just, she should be in favor. What about the wrongdoer? His punishment is a good thing, but he has to be averse to the punishment if it is to be any sort of punishment at all. The difference in the victim's and the bystander's degree of desire for the just deserts can be explained by their differing distances from the locus of the value. But the differing responses of the victim and the wrongdoer cannot be explained by distance alone. Desire and aversion pull in opposite directions. Unless the wrongdoer is averse to his punishment, it is no punishment at all. Unless the victim desires the wrongdoer's punishment, it will not serve its full role in restoring justice.

Value is one thing, the appropriate response to it on the part of a situated valuer is another. The same value may thus elicit different responses depending on how closely the value is located to a value perceiver, the shape of the value, and the orientation of the valuer toward it. The thesis that the appropriate responses to value are experiences, which, like perceptual experiences, are heavily perspectival, defuses what would otherwise be a powerful objection to the agent‐neutrality of value. If the appropriate response to an agent‐neutral value were the same for all, then value would impose a wholly impractical, even inhuman, obligation on a person to effectively ignore his singular position in the network of relationships. Fortunately for us, experiences of agent‐neutral values can legitimately differ from one valuer to another.

Interestingly, these features of value experience help explain the attraction of Nel Noddings's ethics of caring, perhaps the most prominent contemporary educational ethic in the empiricist tradition. For Noddings, the prime value seems to be caring relationships and fostering such relationships through fostering caring itself. But one is not simply supposed to promote caring willy‐nilly, in an agent‐neutral way. Rather, one is supposed to be attentive to the caring that goes on fairly close to oneself. Consequently, it would be bad to neglect one's nearest and dearest even if by doing so one could foster more caring relationships far away. But it is not just distance in the network of care that is important. I am located at the center of a particular network of caring relationships, and my moral task is to tend not just to the amount and quality of caring in my network but also to my peculiar location in the network. So, it would be wrong for me to neglect my caring for those close to me even if by doing so I could promote more or better caring among those very folk. I should not cease to care for my nearest and dearest even if by doing so I could promote higher quality caring among my nearest and dearest. 12

12. Teaching Values on the Critical Empiricist Approach

Agent‐relative responses to agent‐neutral values are, thus, entirely appropriate on a critical empiricist conception of value. If this is right, it is not the job of an educationist to try to impose a uniform experiential response to all matters of value. Rather, it is to try to provide the necessary critical and logical tools for making sense of agent‐neutral values in the light of our highly variable agent‐relative responses, and to elicit and refine the fitting response to value in the light of a valuer's relation to it.

But this, of course, raises a difficult question for any would‐be value educator. How is it possible to teach appropriate responses to value and coordinate such responses with correct value judgments? Partly, this is a philosophical question involving the nature of value and the fitting responses to it, and partly, it is an empirical question involving the psychology of value experience and the most effective ways to develop or refine fitting responses.

Let us begin with a fairly uncontroversial case. It is not difficult for a normal human being to appreciate the value of her own pleasures or the disvalue of her own pains. A normal child will almost always experience her own pain as a bad thing. There is no mystery here, given empiricism, for the child's aversion to pain is part and parcel of the experience of the pain's badness. Indeed, it is through aversion to states like pain, or desire for pleasure, that a child typically gets a grip on the concepts of goodness and badness in the first place, since the good (respectively, bad) just is that to which desire (respectively, aversion) is the normal and fitting response.

Correct judgments on the goodness of one's own pleasures and the badness of one's own pains thus follow rather naturally on the heels of one's direct experiences of those pleasures and pains. What about judgments concerning more remotely located goods and evils? Provided one has some capacity to empathize, one also has the capacity to experience, to some extent, the disvalue of another's pain or the value of another's pleasure, albeit somewhat less vividly than in the case of one's own. Clearly, normal people do have an innate ability, perhaps honed through evolutionary development, to empathize with others in these crucial ways. 13 Recent research suggests that this capacity may be realized by the possession of mirror neurons and that these structures have played a crucial role in the evolution of social behavior. 14 With empathy in place, there is the capacity to experience values located beyond oneself.

What may not always come so naturally, and what might conceivably require some tutoring, is that the exactly similar pains and pleasures of others must have exactly the same value and disvalue as one's own. Even for a good empathizer, given the perspectival nature of value experience, another's exactly similar pain will seem less bad than one's own. And the more distant the pain is, the less bad it will seem. One has to learn, at the level of judgment, to correct for this perspectival feature of value experience. That will mostly be a matter of learning to apply principles of reason—specifically, that if two situations are qualitatively identical at the natural level, they must be qualitatively identical at the level of value. Presumably, knowledge of the agent‐neutrality of the goodness and badness of pain and pleasure will feed back into one's capacity for empathic response, enhancing and refining such responses. A defect in empathy may, thus, be corrected by becoming cognizant of the actual structure of value.

A person may, of course, have a very weak capacity for empathy, or even lack it altogether. This seems to be a feature of severe autism. Interestingly, an autistic person is often capable of using his experience of what is good or bad for him, together with something like universalizability, to gain a purchase on goods and evils located in other beings. His purchase on these more remote goods and evils lacks direct experiential validation, but he can still reason, from experiences of his own goods and evils, to judgments of other goods and evils. An autistic person may not thereby acquire the ability to empathize—just as a blind person may not be taught how to see—but he may still learn a considerable amount about value. 15 The value judgments he endorses will admittedly rest on a severely reduced empirical base, and that may never be enlarged by the theory, but the theory might still be quite accurate.

A more radical defect is exhibited by the psychopath, who seems to have no capacity to reason from his experience of his own goods and evils to goods and evils located elsewhere. 16 It is not clear how one might go about teaching value judgments or value responses to a psychopath. It might be like trying to teach empirical science to someone who has vivid experiences of what is going on immediately around him, but lacks any capacity to reason beyond that or to regard his own experience as a situated response to an external reality. Clearly there are limits to what can be taught and to whom.

13. Conclusion

Value endorsements and their transmission are unavoidable in educational settings, as they are everywhere. The question, then, is not whether to teach values but which values to teach, in what contexts, and how to teach them effectively. Clearly, the constraints of reason are crucial to the cultivation of a coherent set of value endorsements. But reason alone is insufficient. To access values we need some value data, experiences of value. And, to mesh motivation appropriately with value endorsements, value experiences have to be desiderative. This critical empiricist model of value knowledge suggests a model of values education that is richer and more interesting than either its rationalist or its naive empiricist rivals—one in which the cultivation and refinement of emotion, feeling, and desire and the honing of critical skills both play indispensable roles.

Of course, any teaching of values could go awry. That we are serious about teaching values, and that we attempt to do so with due respect for both reason and experience, does not guarantee that we will succeed. We ourselves may have got value wrong. Or, we might possess and try to pass on the right values, but our students reject them. Here, as elsewhere in the educational enterprise, there is always a risk that things might turn out badly despite our noblest intentions and sincerest efforts.

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Values Education, Politics and Religion

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First Online: 19 July 2023

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Bernhard Grümme 18

Part of the book series: Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations ((PPCE,volume 26))

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Values are controversial and the discourse on values is a discourse on crisis. Simultaneously, it becomes clear that values must also be learned. This connection between values and education becomes even more dynamic when one enters the field of religion and politics. How can religious or even Christian values be conveyed in the heterogeneity of late-modern societies in such a way that they have an orienting and meaningful effect without demoting the goals of autonomy? The reflections here aim to develop a profile of values education, which will then be defined with examples from the EVS research. The following considerations attempt to clarify the concept of values, develop a profile of religious values education, and provide a real-life illustration of this by using the example of compassion education. In doing so, the following thesis is validated: Religious education is by no means identical to values education. But it can make a critical and productive contribution to the current discourse on values precisely because of its specificity regarding the idea of God and its integrative, politically dimensioned concept of education. This concept of education is self-reflexive, since it includes consideration of the unreflective assumptions of the EVS and its context.

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Whenever young people party cheerfully in city centres and destroy glass bottles, when people do not pay their cleaner adequately, underground trains are polluted, or managers defraud millions, we hear proclaimed a decay of morals and a loss of values such as solidarity, public spirit, and responsibility. It seems that values are always invoked when a deficit of cultural, individual, or societal resources for shaping the common good and individual life is identified. Obviously, the discourse on values is a discourse on crisis. People attempt to counter the diagnosed phenomena of social disintegration, cultural distortion, or even individual deficits in orientation and meaning with an increased commitment to questions of values. This certainly includes this volume, which researches values concepts in Europe and meticulously differentiates between the processes of secularisation and religious and values-related individualisation in the respective regions. Demands are made for an increased effort to impart values, with the perception that previous attempts to impart values (‘Wertevermittlung’) have failed (Ziebertz 2010 ). This call for the teaching of values is made to institutions such as the family and school. Not coincidentally, it is also made to those involved in religious pedagogy, because religion is believed to have a value-generating, meaning-creating, and orientating power, with religious education in schools in particular supposed to impart values. But is that really the task of religious education? What enables it to carry out this task? The connection between values, politics, religion, and education that can be discerned here generates an urgent need to think more closely from the perspective of religious pedagogy – which academically reflects the instances of religious education such as religious teaching – with a precise question: What contribution can religious pedagogy make to the current discourse on values in a late-modern society and the question of the imparting of values? What are the possibilities, what are the limits, and what are the normative and hermeneutic implications?

The following considerations attempt to justify the thesis: Religious education is by no means identical to values education (‘Wertebildung’). But it can make a critical and productive contribution to the current discourse on values precisely because of its specificity regarding the idea of God and its integrative, politically dimensioned concept of education.

This requires a comprehensive introduction with several stages. First, the problem needs to be further honed in order to specify the initial question (1) and to clarify basic concepts (2). In this context, it is vital to work out the specifics of religious values (3). Only then can the profile of religious values education (4) and its politically dimensioned and communication-theoretical structure (5) be uncovered. A real-life example will then illustrate this (6). The understanding of religious education taken as a basis here stands within the framework of a self-reflexive and politically dimensioned public religious pedagogy (7). Its meaning must be justified in the field of empiricism. This will be done here on the basis of two selected European Values Study (EVS) fields (8), before an evaluation of the critical-constructive contribution of religious pedagogy and a view to the future conclude the considerations (9). However, one must bear in mind that there is no such thing as the religious pedagogy; religious pedagogy is contextually, religiously, and politically differentiated. For example, religious pedagogy in Germany (which is itself heterogeneous) differs in its relative autonomy in relation to church and state from religious pedagogy in Poland, where religious pedagogy is significantly ecclesiocentric and catechetically oriented and where even the term itself is disputed (Milerski 2013 ; Rothgangel et al. 2020 ). The contextuality of my remarks must be taken into account, therefore, if only when it comes to specifying the question.

1 Specification of the Question

The relationship between the identification of a crisis and the intensity of the discourse on values, as the above has indicated, has a peculiar albeit paradoxical similarity to the relationship between diagnosis and treatment. The deeper the identified deficit, the more energetic the insistence on values. This paradox lies in the fact that the relationship invokes something as a precondition that is itself in need of legitimation. The assumption that values should be effective in the background of subjective existence and social coexistence is already based on a presupposition that is itself based on certain values. The empirical research question about the connection between political systems and values or religion and politics, as it is also presented in the EVS, is based on preconditions that must first be legitimised discursively. Weymans, (Chap. 3 , this volume) shows impressively the political instrumentalisation of values. And the investigation that is particularly important at present – to identify what values are supposed to be and to argue if they need to be taught – is itself dependent on value-related preconditions. The basic assumption that society and politics in late-modern transformation processes should be value-guided and value-bearing at all is quite controversial. The dispute over value judgements, which is still simmering in the philosophy of science today, problematises the value guidance of research (Lindner 2017a ). While for some science consists precisely in abstaining from basic value-guided assumptions, for others science is situated in the value-guided circle of knowledge and interest, based on the insights of a hermeneutic circle in the philosophy of science. This dispute is currently reflected in the assessment of the climate crisis. Some, for example the Fridays for Future movement, focus on sustainability, climate justice, and a radical departure from previous patterns of capitalist economic structures, cultural processes of self-understanding, and consumer behaviour. Others bring into play the complexity of social differentiation processes in the transformations of late modernity, suggesting that decisions in modern heterogeneous societies cannot be organised and justified on the basis of certain values and that translations between different social systems and their diverse value systems alone are capable of structuring society and justifying political decisions. The condemnation of ‘moralisation’ arises easily in this context. This was the case especially during the refugee crisis of 2015, when the term was used pejoratively and with politically charged force in debates. It is still a burning topic in disputes within the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD, Protestant Church of Germany) about a refugee ship.

However, it should come as no surprise that the intensification of phenomena and semantics resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic is also reflected in the field of values. Where problems of social segregation become magnified/more intense during a crisis, the debate on values also becomes more dynamic. Against the background of the functional differentiation of politics, law, morality, and religion, this is not without piquancy. While debates on values have always been appealing, in Germany the approach pursued by government in dealing with the pandemic is based on the two-pronged strategy of regulatory and criminal law on the one hand and an appeal to a sense of responsibility for the common good on the other. Admittedly, this means that the government is also taking a firm stand on controversial values issues. In the debates conducted in empirical social research (especially by Ronald Inglehart and Helmut Klages) about a change in values in the twentieth century from materialistic to post-materialistic values, from ‘collective obligation values to individual self-fulfilment values’ (Wagensommer 2020 : 118; Schambeck and Pemsel-Maier 2017 ), the executive takes a one-sided stand against personal self-fulfilment values, which are often even morally discredited in the media. In view of the assessment of the threat posed by the pandemic, it is not the dominance of the executive that is problematic, insofar as it is legally secured. What needs to be clarified in the context of a plural society is rather its value-based positioning. When certain values are insisted upon, the old debate on basic values and the almost forgotten question of a guiding culture are reactivated under pandemic conditions (Schambeck 2017 ).

This intensifies the challenge for religious pedagogy to give a precise account of how it wants to be involved in these socially and politically charged discourses on values. Religious pedagogy must be able to demonstrate its critical-constructive connectivity to the diverse discourses, and this requires an embedding in these discourses, which itself requires conceptual clarification.

2 Conceptual Clarifications

The discourse on values is an ethical discourse. There is a ‘growing need for ethics’ (Englert 2008 : 816; Wagensommer 2020 ) in order for people to be able to cope with the complex and dynamic field of ethically relevant decisions and changing values that is becoming increasingly visible and intense. What is meant by ‘ethics’? Ethics is the form of reflection on good and evil, right and wrong, which is ordered towards morality lived in the real world in the form of chosen actions, action preferences and rules of action. Philosophical and theological ethics both reflect on the ‘morality of morality’ from their own particular horizon ‘and examine, seek and develop reasons for its confirmation or criticism, practical recognition or change’ (Lutz-Bachmann 2013 : 19). Ethics and morality are therefore related to each other like grammar and living language (Ernst 2009 ; Habermas 1991 ). Values, norms, and virtues must be distinguished terminologically. Virtues are understood to be certain moral attitudes of the subject that are habitualised to a certain degree. Norms are prescriptive, ‘ought’ regulations that guide the moral action, thinking, and willing of the subject from the outside, but which are dynamic. Norms are thus ‘to be understood as positively marked possibilities ’ (Möllers 2018 : 14) that are to be realised. Values, on the other hand, are subject-directed goals of morality that are not actually developed by the subject themselves, but which nevertheless guide the subject’s own desires. In this respect, evaluations are to be understood ‘as an elementary form of the normative’ (Möllers 2018 : 403). Norms are oriented towards values and are obligatory and prescriptive. Values, however, in their teleological orientation towards the good, arise from the fact that subjects allow themselves to be taken in by them and freely bind themselves to them (Lindner 2017a , b ). Admittedly, the central philosophical and legal-theoretical discussions revolve around the precise identification of the relationship between values and norms; the objectivity or subjectivity of values and their cognitive, knowledge-accessible or non-cognitive character, attainable via intuitions and affect; and the universalisability of values.

Their respective shapes are, of course, themselves the result of positional judgements, as can be seen in the fundamental tension in discourse on values. For some, values provide orientation and create meaning because they can be derived from an already existing arsenal of values arising from natural law and, ontologically, from a supreme good or an intuitive view of values. Such a materialism of values, in which values can only be retrieved and applied situationally, is disputed in post-metaphysical thought patterns. There, values owe their existence to highly complex processes of value generalisation, which must then be discursively identified and justified in order to gain validity (Wagensommer 2020 ; Lindner 2017b ). Values thus emerge in a processual way through discourse and experience.

Both contrasting positions, however, assume that values must be learned. It is only the design and orientation of the learning process that are questioned. The concept of values education therefore acquires a semantic ambiguity that leads us to the specifics of religious pedagogy. According to Roland Verwiebe ( 2019 ), the term ‘values education’ means, on the one hand, value formation processes in which values are determined in terms of content, in which catalogues of values are shaped. In addition to this shaping of values, it is also about the genesis of values, about knowledge, learning, communication, and an educational confrontation with them (Polak and Klaiber 2019 ). For such a processual, experiential, and pragmatic philosophy of values, as elaborated by Hans Joas, values are formed in experiential, intersubjective processes of self-transcendence and self-formation, where subjects feel touched by something and understand themselves as being brought beyond themselves and from there oriented towards the good. Values thus take on a dynamic, creative, subject-oriented, and contextual character, since they must prove themselves anew and be changed in the face of changing challenges precisely because of their binding power, allowing people to explore and discover what the orienting and meaningful good in each case is (Joas 1999 ; Lindner 2017a ; Lindner 2017b ). Overall, a movement from ‘essentialist’ to ‘relationist’ values can be observed in the discourse on values (Ebertz 2017 ). This is reinforced by migration and globalisation. As a result of their cultural foundation, values are often understood by migrants as a ‘portable home’ (Freise 2017 ), which leads to self-constructions that are identity relevant but at the same time can promote processes of exclusion because they are often not the same as those of the majority society. Against this complex background, the current discourse on values does not speak of a ‘loss of values’, but rather, with a view to the contextuality of thinking with good reasons, of a ‘change in values’, because it is actually not the values that change, but the ‘subjective value rankings’ (Wagensommer 2020 ). Subjects are fundamentally involved in the intersubjective process of values education, which has significant consequences for religious pedagogy. Values are not, then, an object that can simply be transferred like a package. Values education has to be communicative.

3 The Specificity of Christian Discourses on Values

Theological ethics meanwhile emphasises the autonomous nature of ethics and values. Accordingly, there are no specifically Christian values, but rather dynamisations of values in the light of basic theological statements such as the image of God, gifted freedom, and the unconditional dignity of the human being coming from God. Christian faith motivates, initiates, and can also inspire specific attitudes and actions (Hilpert 2009 ). Christian faith focuses on the idea of God. It is not ethics; rather it has ethics. Christian faith in the ever greater God protects, dynamises, orients, but also frames ethics (Grümme 2018a ). Faith in God is more than ethics. This is why the remarkable admonition by a leading politician that the imparting of values is the task of all school subjects, but that religious teaching finds its indispensable specificity in bringing up the idea of God in an experiential and critically productive way, should give us pause for thought (Thierse 2001 ).

It is relevant for the discourse on values that from a secular and democratic perspective this feature of the discourse is considered highly significant for the common good. Jürgen Habermas has marked the difference between a Kant-inspired communicative freedom and a Christian ethic of love. This has essentially to do with the supererogatory character of this freedom, which knows itself to be endowed and taken into service as liberated freedom:

A supererogatory action that goes beyond what can be expected of anyone on the basis of reciprocity means the active sacrifice of one’s own legitimate interests for the good or the reduction of the suffering of the other in need of help. The discipleship of Christ requires of the believer the sacrificium, on the premise, of course, that we freely accept this active sacrifice, sanctified in the light of a just and good God, of an absolute judge. (Mendieta 1999 : 206)

For Habermas, the increasingly ‘derailing modernization’ that can ‘wear down’ the democratic bond and ‘wear out’ solidarity points to such traditions outside formal, procedural rationality (Habermas 2005 : 109, 111). Practical rationality already misses its ‘own destiny when it no longer has the power to awaken and keep awake in profane minds an awareness of solidarity that has been violated worldwide, an awareness of what is missing, of what cries out to heaven’ (Habermas 2008 : 30; Habermas 2001 ). In the face of increasing crises, the democratic state in particular needs an internally guided, conviction-based legitimation of its citizens that goes beyond mere pragmatic acceptance. In this respect, it is based on pre-political sources so that it does not cut itself off from ‘dwindling resources of meaning, solidarity and justice’ (Habermas 2008 : 99) that are also capable of motivating supererogatory actions.

Admittedly, this raises the controversial question of universalisable standards. Such standards of judgement – purely immanent, without horizons beyond the concrete contexts and visions of the good – would be impossible. ‘Who wants to tell the critic of the Indian caste system, who completely rejects it, to please proceed “immanently”? Or remind the critic of patriarchy in a society where it has hardly ever been challenged not to speak a “foreign language”?’ (Forst 2015 : 15). For Hans Joas, systems that create meaning, such as Christianity, provide an overarching standard because they ‘motivate a break with egocentric perspectives’ and do not have the ‘happiness of the members of one’s own culture or faith community in mind alone’ (Joas 1999 : 287). Religions in particular can ‘provide strong universalistic values that are capable of overcoming cultural boundaries, indeed that reckon with and presuppose such differences’ (Ebertz 2017 : 33). Nevertheless, this standard remains too weak in view of the limited possibility of the universalisation of religions. With communication-theoretical approaches, I emphasise the interest in universal identifiability, but frame this with a certain action-theoretical rationality. Accordingly, in the current heterogeneity of life environments, only those values are capable of universalisation that can be justified freely and equally by all at least potentially involved in a mutual, thus reciprocal, and general manner (Forst 2007 ). In the light of this normative criterion, those values and value structures that ‘do not fulfil the standard of reciprocal and general justification and are characterised by forms of exclusion, privileges and domination’ (Forst 2011 : 20) appear to be illegitimate. Thus, value thinking must be substantiated post-metaphysically in modernity and identified critically and contextually.

However, the contextuality of discourse on values draws attention to another important point to which religious pedagogy must orient itself – that the discourse on values has to do with power. This discourse, which initially emerged from a metric-economic field that considered values predominantly in categories concerning the accumulation of goods and finances, is ultimately the counterdesign to far-reaching social and individual experiences of crisis. After the disruption of the systems of idealism, with the impossibility of an overall systematic interpretation of reality and the resulting loss of orientation in thought and action, the philosophy of values attempted in the nineteenth century ‘to remedy the situation by proving the objective validity of values’ and to take this as the occasion for ‘a fundamental reflection on the value and the value-determinacy of human performance (thinking, willing, acting, etc.)’ (Krijnen 2011 : 548). Even in the social experiences of insecurity in the 1980s, the conservative call for a virtue-oriented ‘courage to educate’ was passionately discussed in educational sciences in order to counter the loss of values identified at the time (Benner 1978 ). Here, however, the indeterminacy of the concept of values increases its ‘attractiveness when it comes to bringing up the widespread concern about custom and morality [… which] is usually a conservative rhetoric of “everything used to be better”’ (Schnädelbach 2012 : 166). Quite obviously, the concept of value is used to ‘designate what is socially desirable’ (Lindner 2017a : 101). Against this background, critical attention should certainly be aroused if value discourses are now increasingly gaining momentum in various researches. This applies to religious pedagogy as well as to values research, including the EVS, and should be seen as an indication of the experience of social crisis, but also of theoretical power interests that may be at play. Such affirmative tendencies make it necessary to question the connection between ‘normativity and power’ and to critically examine the discourse on values and thus the discourse on values education within the framework of a critical theory with regard to its hegemonic structures (Forst 2015 ; Brown 2015 ). Only in this way can values and normative orientations be appropriately justified in relation to religious pedagogy. But what does this mean more precisely for the education processes around religious values? We must now consider these in more detail.

4 Values in Education and Upbringing. Setting the Course

Highly relevant for the discourse on values is first the difference and mutual relationship between education and upbringing (Domsgen 2019 ; Englert 2007 ). The process of upbringing starts from the object, from society, and from culture. Upbringing aims to place people in given contexts, in society, in groups, in culture and political systems, in world views, in religions and the church, and thus in certain value systems. The subject is predominantly thought of as passive – the object of educational processes. Teachers and parents are instigators of this process of upbringing. Accordingly, values education means the diachronic and synchronic transmission of values for the continuity of institutions, identities, and structures. Value formation instructs in existing structures.

Education, on the other hand, starts from the subject and ultimately aims at the subject. Education arises from the self-activity of the subjects, who set their own goals. The subject is the agent of an educational process. In that process, a subject actively, critically, and constructively engages with its object world with the goal of maturity and autonomy. In the traditions of Rousseau, Kant, Herder, Schiller, and Humboldt, the goal of education is not to be knowledgeable, mobile, functioning, adapted, and fitted into political contexts, culture, society, and economy. It is to be self-responsible, free, mature, and capable of judgement. Education aims at emancipation and enlightenment – at the realisation of human destiny. The theology of the image of God embedded into the concept of education in Judeo-Christian traditions signifies the internal historical incompleteness and utopian overspill of education. Such educational processes find their measure in the potential self-determination of human beings. The ‘pedagogical paradox’ (Peukert 1987a ), the aporia of how freedom and maturity can be initiated in a relationship of coercion and inequality, in which the pupil should always be able to turn critically against the content, norms, and methods chosen, remains unresolvable. Religious education can therefore be characterised as a ‘language school for freedom’ (Lange 1980 ; Peukert 1987b ; Platzbecker 2013 ), as a process in which people become capable of perception, action, speech, and judgement in their socio-cultural and political context under the liberating yet challenging claim of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Out of the spirit of eschatological hope, it brings a comparative, permanent opening to otherness – to something greater – to educational processes. In this way it is transformational (Grümme 2019 ).

For the discourse on values as it is also dealt with in the EVS, a considerable connectivity becomes apparent here. The orientation towards free subjectivity in the linguistically mediated contextual processes of history and society marks the value-generating, freely binding power of the subjects in an axiomatic way, as well as the categorical contradiction of a values education that narrows itself as a purely inner formation of the heart and attitude of the individual subject. Of course, upbringing and education are intrinsically interrelated in many dimensions. In terms of values pedagogy, this points to the great importance of given value structures and traditions, though these are always to be understood within the framework of autonomy. In this sense, values education functions as a normative as well as a critical standard for upbringing in values.

5 Practical Communication. Contours of Religious Values Education

Values discourses in philosophy and in theology are in agreement with the fundamental statement that values have to be learned. Whether values education is shaped as value grading or value generalisation, it is not self-evident; it does not always make sense intuitively (Lindner 2017b ). In contrast to values upbringing, religious values education emphasises the importance of internally guided understanding, experience-based reflection, and critical self-reflection. If one overlooks the discourse of ethical education in general and values education in particular, a dynamic emerges in two fields that is highly significant for the discussion of the EVS. On the one hand, there is a differentiation arising from the specificity of school form/class/grade and place of learning. Values formation takes place in parishes, in institutions of religious adult education, and in education for the elderly. It has established itself in different types of schools and at different age levels with different didactic focuses (Domsgen 2019 ; Wagensommer 2020 ; Lindner 2017b ). On the other hand, values education is becoming increasingly sensitive to interreligious and intercultural dialogue. Religions are being addressed in the context of integration, but with a highly significant dialectic. On the one hand, they are supposed to be a ferment of integration in civil society, while on the other hand, they are seen as obstacles to integration. Distorted images of Islam – especially its alleged incompatibility with democracy and affinity with violence, which are constructed through its identification with Islamism, along with anti-Semitic stereotypes – are gaining momentum in societies that are disintegrating economically and politically. As a result, comparative research and the internationalisation of the discourse on values are becoming more important, as can be seen not least in EVS. Intercultural theology and interreligious education are thus becoming relevant in the field of values education (Meyer 2019 ).

According to Hans-Georg Ziebertz, this kind of values education, within the horizon of the Christian biblical tradition, aims at the ability to ‘conduct practical discourses on values and to develop a capacity for judgement that enables one to make responsible decisions with regard to the questions: What do I have to do? What should we do? What should be valid? What is desirable and sustainable – for me and for others?’ (Ziebertz 2010 : 434). But how is this religious values education to take place in a subject-oriented and autonomy-oriented form in such a way that values can be brought to bear at the same time (Sajak 2015 )? Research in the sociology of religion as well as the EVS point out that because of secularisation, individualisation, pluralisation, and deconfessionalisation in large parts of Western Europe, an uninterrupted and unbowed transmission of religious values can no longer be assumed (Polak and Schuster, Chap. 6 , this volume). This requires an enormous dynamisation of values education (Grümme 2017 ). This heterogeneous complexity and the interdependence of political, societal, and religious aspects needs to be identified and proven in the values education of religious pedagogy. On the one hand, it is necessary to instil values for the sake of the formation of the subject’s judgement and autonomy and the common good. On the other hand, these values must be instilled in such a way that they do not undermine the goals of autonomy in form and content.

Hans-Georg Ziebertz ( 2010 ) has worked out four procedures of values education, which he discovers diachronically as well as synchronically in religious pedagogy (Grümme 2018a ). These have always been prevalent in the history of Christian moral education:

The transmission of values , which aims to convey given values in an orienting way. Whether in patristic pedagogy with Augustine or in medieval monastic and urban middle schools, or even in the modern schools of the Reformation, this form of moral learning is focused on the transmission of the Church’s moral teachings to the next generation. The focus is not on the subjects but on the message (Ziebertz and Roebben 2017 ). It is a material ethics in the context of a largely closed, particular universe of values into which the children and young people are introduced by moral pedagogical impulses. Its yield lies in the rootedness of this morality in the lifeworld (‘Lebenswelt’), which receives consolidation and motivation from there. It offers the consistency of a catalogue of values that provides orientation and meaning, as it corresponds to the logic of material ethics of values elaborated above. Its limitation, however, lies in its inability to adequately cope with the pluralism of values. It remains heteronomous (Meyer-Ahlen 2010 ).

The elucidation of values , which is intended to reflectively illuminate the internalised values of the students. While the first model is deductively oriented and promotes fitting into what already exists, the inductively structured second model leads to a reduction to individually significant values. Here, only those values that are present in the subject are revealed, but they are hardly learned ethically.

In contrast, the third model of values development aims to initiate a gradual increase of competence in moral judgement. In Lawrence Kohlberg’s approach, the discussion of moral conflicts through dilemma stories is intended to enable principled ethical judgement. This structural-genetic model pervades the inner teleology from an egoistic to a universalistic and increasingly internalised justification of moral judgements (Schmid 2015 ). As convincing as this model is with regard to the genesis of ethical judgement, there remain reservations with regard to a cognitive narrowing or even an ‘apolitical’ moralising (Sutor 1980 ; Grümme 2009 ).

It is therefore not surprising that this is joined by a more interactional model: the model of values communication . Based on the concept of communicative rationality of Jürgen Habermas and Helmut Peukert, the focus here is on participation in argumentative discussion processes. It aims to make the ability to communicate and argue possible through a change of perspective from the situation of all others. Maturity is thereby increasingly presupposed in the process, in accordance with the pedagogical paradox. It is about the argumentative examination of validity claims and the clarification of which values and values orientations can claim validity (Ziebertz 2010 ). If there are no more values, no more sets of norms and virtues that can be validly unquestioned as material and formal horizons of justification and goals, then the formation of ethical value orientations and their critical reflection have to be placed in the foreground. The focus is on critical judgement with regard to contextually pressing moral problems. Helmut Peukert ( 1987a ) exemplarily shows how this approach is rooted in concepts of communication theory on the one hand and a correlatively connected anthropologically directed theology on the other hand. An ‘ethics of intersubjective creativity’ should, with recourse to the well-rehearsed impulses of the Judeo-Christian tradition, enable subjects to master the challenges of the present in the service of their autonomy and, to this end, to be able to critically and transformatively deal with traditional and currently propagated value structures in the search for ‘jointly supported orientations’ (Knauth 2017 : 155).

In contrast to privatisation and immunity from politics, the integration of religious values education into social processes should be considered (Grümme 2009 ; Gärtner and Herbst 2020 ). Drawing on research from critical political education, which seeks to counteract the ‘individualisation of social problems’ (Lösch 2020 : 400), I vote for the concept of a political dimension to religious pedagogy, which configures religious education ‘against any individualization and privatization’ (Könemann 2020 : 197) in its social, political, and structural aspects, without disregarding the importance of aesthetics, critical judgement, and emotionality. It is precisely the idea of the subject that ensures that the political dimension of religious teaching does not absorb the subjects into structural contexts. Rather, it is a matter of mediating reference to self and to the world with each other and of transferring them into critical contexts of evaluation, which not only questions prevailing ideologies and hegemonic tendencies in an ideology-critical way, but at the same time self-critically reflects on its own place in them (Grümme 2009 ; Grümme 2017 ; Grümme 2019 ).

This political dimension of religious values education results in an important distinction between two forms of learning in religious values education. Social learning attempts to guide the subject towards solidarity and reasonable self-determination and co-determination. It aims for the willingness and ability to communicate, to cooperate, to show solidarity and responsible conflict-solving behaviour, to develop a stable ego identity, social sensitivity, perspective-taking, tolerance, critical faculties, and the appropriate handling of rules. Social learning is ethically and inter-communicatively oriented. The focus is on personal social competences in relation to the self, the peer group, the family, and the community. Political learning , on the other hand, aims at political maturity. It is about power, legal order, ideology and manipulation, domination and interest, the meaning and function of political institutions, and the normative orientation of the political. It is about loyalty and criticism, and about support and transformation. In contrast to face-to-face interaction, political learning is thus systemic and structurally oriented and relates to the context of society as a whole (Wohnig 2017 ; Herdegen 1999 ; Massing 2007 ).

This points to concrete forms of learning in religious values education. Since values education aims to shape judgement and motivation as well as action, it goes without saying that such learning in religious education integrates cognitive, affective, and volitive moments in order to transcend a cognitivist narrowing and instead shape a ‘prosocial sensitisation as holistic moral education’ (Hilger 2006 : 239). This is articulated in forms of learning ‘that go beyond purely cognitive activation and also touch on feelings and imaginations, basic attitudes and life goals, lifestyles and role models respectively models’ (Englert 2017 : 93). Based on the experience that before all morality to be created, a good life is based on an obligatory justification and from there gains strength, impulses, and reserves of resistance, religious values education aims for the ability to empathise, and at social cognition as learning through insight and prosocial action. Cognitive methods are thus to be complemented by learning from the model, by learning through instruction, and by learning through social affirmation. Performative experiences of morally relevant practice must be made possible (Mette 1994 ). It is always important to initiate such attitudes of perspective-taking, commitment to the community, participation, and socio-moral responsibility in an action-oriented way and with recourse to experiential and formative pedagogical foundations. Constructivist, strictly subject-oriented approaches prove their particular relevance here (Rekus 2000 ; Schlag 2011 ). Teaching and places of learning outside of school must be distinguished not least by their learning setting and – especially under the specific challenges of the all-day structure of the school – to be productively related to each other. Accordingly, subject-oriented, experience-oriented, and action-oriented approaches such as the dilemma method, narrative ethics, biographical learning, learning from local heroes and local victims, learning from injustice, diaconal learning, or social internships form important elements of ethical judgement formation (Meyer-Ahlen 2010 ; Kropač 2012 ; Mendl 2015 ). Nevertheless, where religious values education disregards the embedding in political-economic contexts – where one thinks that a change of heart or a transformation of the communitarian relations of interpersonal togetherness would correspond to the complexity of reality, the formative imprints of society, culture, and history as well as the dynamics of the Kingdom of God – the political framing of religious education draws attention to structural-systemic effects and transfers them into educational contexts that assert themselves without the person knowing. This, however, presupposes a concept of religious education that can constructively and critically confront the challenges and ideological tendencies of the discourse on values outlined above and already points to what such a concept of religious values education could introduce into the diverse public spheres of late-modern societies with their thoroughly heterogeneous value concepts, as the EVS shows with its comparative analysis of value concepts in Europe. Let us illustrate what has been said with an impressive example.

6 Compassion: A Role Model for Values Education in Late Modern Society

Compassion, a difficult term that can best be translated as pity, sympathy, involvement, solidarity, and ‘being human for others’ (Kuld 2008 : 13; Kuld 2003 ), is the key concept, principle, and guiding word of a large-scale social project in schools in Germany. As part of a social internship, pupils usually spend 2 weeks in social institutions such as care homes for elderly people, kindergartens, institutions for those with disabilities, or hospitals. They are prepared for this in class and accompanied by (religion) teachers during the internship. After the internship, they reflect on their experiences and the internship portfolios they have created (Kuld and Gönnheimer 2000 ).

Theologically, the Compassion Project is shaped by a mysticism of compassion, as elaborated in particular by Johann Baptist Metz as the key word of Christianity:

The mysticism of the Bible – in monotheistic traditions – is at its core a political mysticism. More closely, a mysticism of political, of social compassion. Its categorical imperative is: wake up, open your eyes! Jesus does not teach a mysticism of closed eyes, but a mysticism of open eyes and thus of the unconditional duty to perceive other people’s suffering. (Metz et al. 2000 : 8)

The main leaders emphasise that this religious meaning does not necessarily have to be connected with the Compassion Project, because it is not about normative pedagogy and imparting a religious world view but about practising an ethical attitude of social responsibility and solidarity. Nevertheless, this is certainly where the difficulty of the transferability of this project – initially developed for Roman Catholic schools – lies, because of the undeniable connection between the project and religious motivation. In a combination of experiential, reflexive, and pragmatic moments, it aims to ‘develop socially committed attitudes such as solidarity, cooperation and communication with people who, for whatever reason, are dependent on the help of others’ (Kuld 2008 : 13). The project aims to develop dispositions towards altruism, willingness to cooperate, prosociality, affection, benevolence, and empathy and solidarity with those who are suffering. The Compassion Project can be distinguished from other forms of prosocial learning or practical social activities in education in that action-oriented experience, information, reflection, and evaluation are linked together. Only under these conditions can behavioural motivations and attitudes be initiated. Feelings alone oscillate and do not lead to the establishment of ethical attitudes. Therefore, the Compassion Project, which is accompanied broadly by religious pedagogy, pedagogy and learning psychology, and which has also just been evaluated on its success (Kuld 2004 ), belongs in the context of school learning, though it is, strictly speaking, a form of opening up school.

This values education project has been discussed quite critically. Is it not reduced to social learning? Does it reach the political level? First, one must consider its limited claim. It does not claim to create a better person. Nor does it intend to be a ‘repair shop for society’. The limits of school learning prevent immediate social transformation. Because the school reaches all adolescents like no other social institution or like no other social or civil society or church milieu, the school ‘cannot solve the problems of society, but it can show how to reflect on these problems and what approaches there are to solving them and what the consequences of these solutions are’ (Kuld 2004 : 13). That is why targeted care for the neighbour cannot solve the phenomena of social crisis. ‘Nevertheless, the Compassion Project sees itself as a measure against the social death of cold. In this respect, the Compassion project is political’ (Kuld and Gönnheimer 2000 : 10). The Compassion Project thus concentrates recognisably on social learning and opens up to the political in the broad and best sense of politics. Of course, learning at school is always subject to reservations concerning reality. Being able to bring socio-political reality into the classroom in a selective way only is an institutional limitation but at the same time an advantage of school. The question is to what extent those involved in this project aim to protect the concept from the danger, which they recognise, of it being a vade mecum (handbook or guide) and ‘repair workshop’ for social conflicts or merely a cure for the symptoms of crises. This danger could be minimised if the categories of thought within the concept were to go beyond the interpersonal into structural categories that would also consider structural interests, conditions of domination, power contexts, or economic contexts through social and civil society togetherness. These categories of thought would have to become effective above all in the preparatory and follow-up phases of the social internship. Furthermore, these structural and self-imposed limits would have to be made self-reflexive. Then the Compassion Project would be a model for how religious values education could work in the school public.

7 Religious Values Education in Public Religious Education

In late modernity, the public sphere has become a forum for the articulation of diverse traditions and values, where traditions have to prove their truth in a constructive-critical confrontation with others. Without being able to show it here, it can be stated that this also applies to a religious pedagogy that understands its approach in the light of the ‘signs of the times’ as the Second Vatican Council emphasised in one of its most famous documents. It must make audible in public its claim to truth and its prophetic-critical impulse, as well as its consoling, liberating spaces of experience, but without coming to undue self-absolution and thus undermining the achievement of the modernisation processes of functional differentiation (Grümme 2018b ; Dreier 2018 ).

But what can this look like in practical, real-world terms? What needs to be considered? First, I will discuss formal, then content-related aspects. In the discourse on religious pedagogy, a multi-dimensional model of public spheres has been developed that can help here. According to this model, religious values education would instil its values into the public spheres of schools and civil society and into national and transnational public spheres in the same way as a public religion does: in a communicative-discursive manner. It would do so without a claim to primacy, prepared rather to learn and to be dialogue-oriented (Grümme 2018b ; regarding the imparting of values Europäisches Parlament 2017 ). A central problem here is the question of how to deal with the normativity of religious values and their specific options without undermining the freedom of the subjects and the plurality of the public spheres. This is where the Beutelsbach Consensus (1976) – developed by researchers in the field of political didactics – comes into play (Grümme 2021 ). This consensus is the result of intensive discussions about the status of normativity in the field. In contrast to concepts of legitimation, in which the status quo was justified in terms of political didactics, but also in contrast to those of mission, where political education is instrumentalised for the implementation of democratic thinking, the Beutelsbach Consensus of 1976 has gained axiomatic significance with its three maxims within the framework of a concept of political education oriented towards maturity:

The prohibition of overpowering. According to this, the boundary between indoctrination and political education exists where learners are prevented from gaining an independent judgement. Political learning takes place in the sense of a desired, predetermined opinion.

The controversiality of teaching, which reflects the controversial nature and pluralism of the political in science and politics.

To enable students to analyse a political situation and their own interests and to look for means and ways to influence the situation in terms of their own interests. What is presupposed here, in an emphatic sense, is an understanding of education ‘in the tradition of the elucidation as an engagement with politics shaped by the guiding mode of rationality’, which seeks to promote human maturity ‘in the sense of independent judgement and action’ and refers ‘to democracy as a desirable political order’ (Sander 2005 : 28; Herbst 2019 ). According to the hard-won consensus, the prohibition of overpowering marks a boundary that cannot be crossed. Even if it were a matter of a judgement that affirmed the basic democratic order, this judgement cannot be forced. The form and content must be recognisably in agreement and oriented towards the postulate of maturity. The teaching methodology cannot be designed in such a way that it contradicts the goal of political education. An education oriented towards maturity and freedom is counteracted by a non-participatory, authoritarian teaching style. Conversely, participatory, student-oriented teaching practises what such a pattern of education is all about. Emancipation as a learning goal would be turned into its contrast if it were imposed doctrinally. Footnote 1

But this should shape the question of normativity in religious values education (Grümme 2021 ). Religious values education, which qualifies as a language school of freedom, must on its own terms make it possible for its values education to remain discursively oriented. In its performative execution, it must therefore itself be oriented towards the norms of autonomy and freedom. In doing so, it must not only critically reflect its hegemonic instrumentalisations within the framework of a socially demanded transmission of values, but must be sensitive – as has only recently happened in religious education – to processes in its practice that threaten to thwart its own goals. If values are generated and communicated in experiential practices – if God’s liberating message is communicated – then it would thwart precisely this normative values process if obscure exclusions were associated with it. Inclusion pedagogy or interreligious learning has shown depressing examples of this (Grümme 2021 ). In the desire to support people, they are earmarked in advance as worthy of support in the learning group and thus singled out in a negative way. The concept of values education as a basic foil of ethical education obviously needs an ideology-critical praxeological reflection.

It is a basic tenet of such self-reflective values education that the participants can also position themselves against other well-rehearsed values. Only in this way can religious education become a place of learning for strong tolerance (Forst 2014 ). The performativity of the educational process itself becomes a space in which this normativity is played out, controlled, and specified. Moralisation – which essentially consists in the fact that morality ‘means being able to leap over’ (Nothelle-Wildfeuer 2019 : 453) factual knowledge – is avoided by discussing factual questions multidimensionally and deliberating procedural questions in discourse.

At the same time, this has consequences for the content profile of values education. A common distinction in political science could help to make the contribution in terms of content more precise and at the same time clarify the political implications. If one adopts the subdivision of the foundations (polity), processes (politics), and contents (policy) of politics (Meyer 2006 ), then the specific contribution of religious pedagogy to values education becomes apparent in school and in national and transnational terms. Within the polity dimension , aspects of the political system, the constitution, but above all the genesis of value attitudes, of willingness to act, of civil society and political commitment, and thus of political culture, make religious values education highly compatible. Crucially, it is the inalienable dignity of the other and the challenge of not being allowed to lose anyone in which this becomes real. Ulrich Riegel ( 2017 ) shows in empirical studies that it was precisely in the refugee crisis of 2015 that church congregations were involved in emergency accommodation, care, and accompaniment.

In the politics dimension , religious education, with its tradition of the image of God is important, which it introduces into educational processes with a claim to truth, bringing this claim into dialogue with other claims to truth and assessing these claims critically. In this way, the values education of religious pedagogy is challenged in its formal, processual design. Whether religious teaching or adult education is structured authoritatively or dialogically as a ‘language school of freedom’ (Lange 1980 ) is politically highly relevant; where they are designed authoritatively, they are likely to performatively counteract their claim to truth. This shows how religion can be introduced into a plural and heterogeneous society. On the one hand, religious moral positions are introduced critically and in a conflictual way by institutions such as the church, mosque community, or synagogue. This is especially the case in the field of sexual morality, abortion, and the evaluation of homosexuality. The evaluations of the EVS show impressively how much influence this situation can have on the respective European regions (Halman and Sieben this volume ). On the other hand, the possible dissent also proves that ‘any moral resource in a democratically constituted society can only ever be an offer against which the individual must position himself’ (Riegel 2017 : 51).

And finally, the policy dimension challenges the concrete content values that are brought in as a contribution to values education in religious pedagogy – the material core of religious traditions with their specific interests, perspectives, horizons of meaning, and liberating as well as critical-transformative promises of salvation. This can sharpen the depth of problems and contribute to the problematisation of the self-evident, to the politicisation of the apolitical, to the interruption of unquestioned mentalities and ideologies, and to the orientation of the content. Here, religious pedagogy must introduce its tradition of God’s hope as a tradition of freedom and justice, of hope for a life in abundance for all, and as a liberating as well as a critical message, whereby the only adequate form under the conditions of late-modern transformation and secularisation processes is a discursive-dialogical one (Grümme 2018b ).

In summary, this commentary has outlined, through its passage through various aspects of religious values education, the contribution in terms of content and form that religious values education can make in a critical and productive way to the current values debates, to which the EVS wants to provide an essential impulse. Certainly, religious education in its axiomatic reference to the question of God is more than ethics and the imparting of values (Grümme 2018a ). And yet, because of the historical-social relevance of hope in God, religious education cannot be practiced without ethics and values education. It is first about researching and taking into account the value-related learning preconditions of the subjects, and second about making values ‘represented and accessible’ in many dimensions in the midst of a heterogeneous society, offering value-based learning occasions ‘appropriate to the subject matter’ (Lindner 2017b : 7). It is critical and self-reflexive, especially against its political and social forms of value transmission, as it addresses the question of power and reveals the instrumentalisation contexts, attempting to overcome them in a critical-constructive way. In doing so, it also critically examines hermeneutics and methodologies with which questions of values are thematised and investigated. But what could this mean in concrete terms? This will be at least sketchily indicated in relation to three contributions to this EVS volume.

8 Concretisation

It is impossible to deal here with the multifaceted richness of the EVS as a reference point for religious values education. As an example, I will concentrate on three approaches in order to outline their potential in the values debate:

Correlation of religious practice and end-of-life-morality ( abortion , euthanasia , suicide )

Inge Sieben and Loek Halman evaluate the EVS in the light of their research question as to whether there is a correlation between the transformation of the religious and moral landscape in the processes of modernity. They aim to investigate the relationship between religious practice and moral attitudes regarding the justification of abortion, suicide, and euthanasia. In doing so, they cluster the European countries examined in the EVS into five groups (Halman and Sieben this volume ): (1) Northern Europe (most secular and mainly Protestant); (2) Western Europe (like Germany most secular, Catholic, or mixed); (3) Southern Europe (like Spain least secular, mainly Catholic); (4) ex-communist Eastern Europe (like Slovenia or Poland); and (5) ex-Soviet Union (like Armenia). They define the degree of religious practice by the frequency of attendance at religious services, whereas religious belief is defined by the answer in the binary logic of yes–no to the question as to whether someone is a religious person. They conclude that:

The associations at the country level between secularisation and end-of-life morality (measured by correlation coefficients) are clearly positive in all five regions in Europe, indicating that higher levels of secularisation go hand in hand with more permissiveness towards abortion, euthanasia, and suicide. This is in line with the ideas of modernisation theories. In addition, the assumption of the integration perspective that religious practice as an indicator of this secularisation is more salient for a population’s end-of-life morality than religious beliefs is confirmed for three out of five regions: in Western Europe, Southern Europe and ex-Soviet countries, the macro-level correlation coefficients between levels of church attendance and end-of-life morality are higher than the correlation coefficients between levels of religiousness and end-of-life morality. In the Northern region, the two correlation coefficients are about equal and rather modest, while in the ex-communist countries the correlation between the levels of religiousness and end-of-life morality […] is higher than the correlation between the levels of religious attendance and end-of-life morality. (Halman and Sieben, Chap. 4 , this volume : 145)

Political values and religion: a comparison between Western and Eastern Europe

Susanne Pickel and Gert Pickel (Chap. 5 , this volume) want to investigate to what extent democracy, values relevant to democracy, and religion are interrelated. They use the EVS data base to gain comparative insight into the complex interrelationships between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. The concepts of secularisation, individualisation, and a free-market rational-choice model of religion are the criteria for evaluating the data. The results are disillusioning. On the one hand, they show a growing tension between an increasingly secularised West and an East that is turning more towards religion and religious values. On the other hand, they show that religious values have an influence on democratic attitudes and practices and that they motivate and strengthen voluntary engagement, but that religious values vary according to the degree of secularisation and the form of religious ties and, especially in the East, stand in contrast to an open, democratic society:

While socially committed believers oppose prejudices and anti-democratic attitudes, dogmatic, orthodox, and fundamentalist believers more often come into electoral affinity with anti-democrats […]. Against the background of a still widespread revitalisation in Eastern Europe, this relationship – viewed with some caution – appears to be a cause for concern if one looks at it from the perspective of a supporter of liberal democracy. (S. Pickel and G. Pickel, Chap. 5 , this volume: 195)

Religious values education can follow these two different studies both critically and constructively. It would critically question the indicators. Can religion really be measured by the binary logic of yes–no or even by the frequency of religious practices? This does not do justice to the multidimensionality of subjective references to religion as developed in religious education. Empirical research on the religiosity of Islamic youth in Germany has shown that they see their ethical attitudes as being conditioned by Allah’s commandments. However, the fact that this confession gives them a foothold and a home in an alien environment from which they feel rejected plays a role (Riegel 2015 ). Here, religion serves as a distinguishing feature that creates identity.

These studies also fail to take into account the specific logic of the construction of religion (Kropač 2019 ). A contextual education of values would examine, for example, whether the politically induced fuelling of national narratives by the PiS government in Poland has not led to a specific re-Catholicisation, which at the same time has motivated certain development regarding abortion. But is not the research question already too simple, insofar as it excludes autonomous, non-religious justifications of morality? Does it not play into the hands of those traditionalist currents (such as in Poland) which, by establishing such a correlation, pursue an unreflected transfer of values?

In both Halman and Sieben and S. Pickel and G. Pickel, a major problem lies in the simplistic concept of religion. To avoid this, Riegel and Schneiker ( 2017 ) instead prefer a more open approach that brings together individualised and institutionalised religion and religiosity in order to investigate the possible influence of religiosity on voluntary social engagement. Moreover, they call for the supplementation of purely quantitative studies with qualitative methods, because this is the only way to do justice to the complexity of the field. In other words, a purely quantitative study would need a triangular supplementation in which qualitative approaches are included. A hermeneutic and self-reflexive framing of one’s own methodology and a differentiated awareness of contextuality would be necessary. At this point, religious values education could constructively highlight the value-generating power of the subjects in their respective contexts, which are analysed in an ideology-critical way. It could draw attention to the fact that this is not necessarily connected with a moral permissiveness or with prejudices against minorities, homosexuals, Muslims, and gender, as Halman and Sieben or S. Pickel and G. Pickel assume in this volume, but rather marks the unquestionable theonomous autonomy of human beings in front of God. Religious values education would, under the specific conditions of the respective European regions, discursively introduce God’s message in a contextual, discursive way as a contribution to values education concerning these highly complex issues, insisting on the complexity of such issues in a multiperspective way in the sense of values communication.

Religious and political values among different classes

Pierre Bréchon (Chap. 8 , this volume) examines the available EVS data using a sociological approach to education. He is not primarily concerned with the problem of social stratification. In a European comparison, he examines the barely researched sociological question of the extent to which the underprivileged and those living in the precariat show specific values orientations in the political and religious fields. In doing so, he forms four groups from the selected 21 European states according to regional order: Western Europe (like Austria, France, Germany), Eastern Europe (like Bulgaria, Poland), Southern Europe (Italy, Spain) and Nordic countries (like Denmark or Sweden). His results, obtained through a differentiated methodology, are also highly relevant for religious values education. Irrespective of finely worked-out regional differentiations, for example between quite Catholic states such as Austria or Spain and multi-confessional states such as Germany, he shows that people in the precariat do have specific value orientations in political and religious respects.

At the religious level, the precarious are slightly more religious and practise more than the more privileged categories. […]. This does not prevent them from being more dissatisfied with those in power, but they mobilise less strongly in public action, whether through voting or social and political protest. They do not easily trust in others and in institutions. They are less inclined to left-wing values, they also show greater xenophobia and nationalism, and they are less attached to democratic values. (Bréchon, Chap. 8 , this volume: 308)

This is enormously revealing for religious values education, because the results coincide with its axiomatically anchored postulates of subject orientation and contextuality, not least that newer religious pedagogy develops a great sensitivity towards the marginalised and aims to constitutively bring the values and narratives of the marginalised to bear as the basis of correlative educational processes (Grümme 2013 ; Hermann 2002 ). It also critically analyses the middle-class orientation prevailing in current religious pedagogy and reflects praxeologically on her own practice for accomplished disadvantages and exclusions (Grümme 2021 ). Of course, this is not a side issue for her. From the heritage of the biblical idea of the image of God, which grants equal dignity to every human being, religious pedagogy actively demands educational justice for all, which constitutively takes into account the hegemonic structures in politics, economy, and education (Grümme 2014 ).

9 Conclusion and Perspectives

The connection between values, religion, politics, and education thus turns out to be a highly complex one. If one takes the comparative values research of the EVS as a testing ground, then it becomes apparent that a purely instrumental conception of the imparting of values is problematic. The attempts at instrumentalisation by society, the church, the economy, and politics are too strong, each in their own way pushing unabatedly to convey values. The subliminal revitalisation of a guiding culture and the tendencies towards a predominantly affirmative orientation avoid a preceding discourse about which values should be incorporated into the heterogeneity of late-modern societies. One might, for example, ask why the initiatives of both Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany in the field of democracy, ethics, and economics (and thus also values) are not articulated more strongly in the practice of values education. Actually, the German churches, with their statements on economic policy, democracy, and migration and refugee policy, should translate these directly and immediately into value-forming initiatives in religious education. This would also be of great interest in the field of religious education, as it could demonstrate the relevance of such education for society and the church, which it otherwise risks losing in the processes of secularisation and the crisis of legitimacy of the Catholic Church in particular. While religious education is not an agency for communicating values and is centred on the question of God, this question is certainly not to be dealt with without values, since Christianity sees itself as a religion of discipleship, which reveals its practical truth through discipleship. Here there are undeniable overlaps between ethics and hope in God. But the hope in God deconstructs in the end all conceptual and ethical practices towards the ever-greater God, who orients ethics exactly by this.

The considerations discussed here aimed to make it clear that a pure imparting of values does not do justice to this highly complex and dynamic relationship between values, religion, and politics. They counter this with a vote for a critical-constructive values education that is decidedly contextually oriented. This education should be formulated along the lines of a critical theory that critically reflects on the discourse of values itself regarding its hidden assumptions, its instrumentalisations, and its distortions. This applies to the processes of values education as well as to values research, including that of the EVS (Weymans, Chap. 3 , this volume), which can probably only be protected from positivistic and contextually insufficiently differentiated undertones by this means. An increased interdisciplinary cooperation between empirical and hermeneutical research is necessary. Late modern societies need values. But an appropriate values education can only come from the value-forming power of subjects, who themselves stand in contexts of hegemonic subjectification. Such a critical-constructive religious values education, which is subject-oriented as well as capable of heterogeneity, admittedly still awaits its concrete shaping.

Therefore, a sensitive distinction and precise clarification is needed if political education has to ‘lead to democratisation and emancipation’ (Rickers 2001 : 1531). Therefore, an emancipatory programme would have to be critically examined.

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Grümme, B. (2023). Values Education, Politics and Religion. In: Polak, R., Rohs, P. (eds) Values – Politics – Religion: The European Values Study. Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31364-6_13

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The Role of Personal Values in Learning Approaches and Student Achievements

Kelum a. a. gamage.

1 James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

D. M. S. C. P. K. Dehideniya

2 Department of Education, University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya 20400, Sri Lanka; moc.liamg@ayinedihedkpcs (D.M.S.C.P.K.D.); moc.liamg@anammagitayukas (S.Y.E.)

Sakunthala Y. Ekanayake

Associated data.

The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy.

Personal values play a significant role when adopting learning approaches by individuals during their studies. Particularly in higher education, these values significantly influence the character that individuals play within their learning community and ultimately influence their academic achievements. The purpose of this paper is to investigate personal values in their choice of learning approaches and, subsequently, how it impacts one’s academic achievements. It also investigates the importance of developing an individual’s personal values as a part of their wider studies, while aligning these with graduate attributes and balancing them with knowledge and skills, to produce successful graduates in a society.

1. Introduction

Values are the fundamental beliefs, behaviours and attitudes that have been approved and accepted as what is good by society for a long time. In the most general sense, they are considered as the virtues that a person holds in his or her life. However, philosophers, researchers, practitioners and many others have defined and addressed values from different perspectives concerning the respective discipline or contexts. Generally, values are viewed as inner realities of an individual that are reflected through habits, behaviours, beliefs, expectations and relationships. Values lay the foundation for an individual’s pattern of thinking and way of acting. They play a vital role in how one makes decisions, choices and builds perceptions and attitudes. Additionally, various studies on personal values have shown that they often guide decision making in all aspects of life such as career, religion, social circles and self-identity [ 1 ]. Another aspect of personal values is that they can be viewed as desirable motivational goals and interests of an individual or the guiding principles in life. In addition, they have been seen as the non-existent mental entities and as the outcomes of mental development. Consequently, values can be seen as the perceptions of psychological expressions or frame of mind. Moreover, they are consequential issues that manifest the personality of an individual. Hence, the realisation of personal values by the self is crucial and determines the growth and the existence of the self in any situation. Conversely, understanding another person’s respected values is also important.

As a consequence of the constant transformation of society in terms of culture, economics and politics, value and value systems have been unusually changed and distorted. In favour of the same idea, Daniela et al. [ 2 ] justify this by arguing, “with modernity it is normal that personal value systems support changes to harmonize itself to current requirements”. Initially, some of the personal values may be determined by birth and later greatly influenced and molded by education, experiences, society, culture and many other factors. According to Matthews et al. [ 3 ], an alteration in lifestyle, cultural environment and economic circumstances, individually or a combination of these factors, can cause values to change. Personal value systems can be viewed as a relatively permanent framework that exists within an individual which decides what is good or bad for himself or herself and his or her companions. In addition, it shapes and influences the general nature of an individual’s behaviour. Researchers have found that personal values developed early in life may be resistant to change and may be derived from those of particular groups or systems, such as culture, religion and political party. However, personal values are not universal. Genetically inherited features and external factors including education may determine one’s personal values. Essentially, the antecedents of values are culturally embedded in society and its institutions [ 3 ] and are socially determined [ 2 ]. Although a personal value is an internal phenomenon, the motivating force to adopt the value is seen as emanating from a diverse range of external sources [ 4 ]. As values directly influence one’s entire lifestyle, a discussion of values and value systems, their place within changing socioeconomic contexts and how they affect individuals and society has universal relevance.

The value systems of a society always determine human activity in social life, education and professional life. Values are seen as a key component of organisational culture and are repeatedly defined as the principles accountable for the successful management of the organization [ 5 ]. Arambewela and Hall [ 6 ] support the same issue, stating [ 7 ]: personal values have long been considered an important variable in understanding consumer behaviour and decision making. As a result, the interest in knowing the drivers behind consumer attitudes and behaviour has encouraged marketing researchers to investigate human values [ 8 ] (Anana and Nique, 2014). Hence, many researchers have emphasised the need and advantage of studying the impact of personal values on the sustainable existence of an organisation.

Investigating the influence of values on assessments made by people on their career choices is another trending research area. In general, professions such as teaching, medicine and nursing are strongly attached and influenced by values. The results of a research study by Anana and Nique [ 8 ] has concluded that students choosing some careers are more typical, based on their values than others, and that some values are more typical of some careers than others. Thus, personal values have been taken as the main focus in the research in a variety of fields and academic disciplines ([ 3 ] cites Feather, 1975). In this regard, the need for identifying different scopes of human values is a timely requirement. Since professional values are also shaped and influenced by personal values, indeed a discussion on personal values can be regarded as an issue that unchanged over time.

There has been a growing concern over the erosion of values among youth during the past few years, and it is continually progressing. At the same time, the need for facilitating value development has become the greatest challenge ahead in the field of education. The effects of the value given to material comforts, money, fame and success are prominently reflected through the present younger generation. Hence, there is a considerable emphasis in this new century on the development of values: tolerance, social justice, open-mindedness, empathy and deep respect for others. Since realizing values and adopting and displaying them as one’s personality is closely associated with education, values education is given a greater emphasis today to ensure the continuity of societies. The functions of education in molding student’s moral, spiritual and sociocultural life are some of the areas that have received renewed attention in the recent past. In addition, they have long been considered important variables in understanding student behaviours, attitudes and achievements. Consequently, the outcomes of Branson [ 4 ] provide an insight into the benefits of value-based studies in educational management and administration. The realization of value can offer assistance in organizing the learning process by explaining and understanding students’ reactions to various situations and tailoring and evaluating the learning experience. Though students’ learning takes place within the self, it is not an isolated process. Research has confirmed that learning is affected by a variety of internal and external factors. Researchers have observed variations in students’ learning approaches, and furthermore, they have found qualitative differences in learning outcomes that were related to the approaches taken (Matthews et al. [ 3 ] refer Marton and Saljo [ 9 ]). Accordingly, if the personal values deal with the behaviour of a person, learning may also have influenced by personal values. Based on that assumption, a number of researchers study the composition and structure of students’ learning approaches and personal values [ 10 ] and their interconnections have been observed in various contexts. Research in this area confirms that values are related to different approaches to learning and they may change according to the circumstances. Considering the students’ behaviour in different academic situations, researchers have categorized the learning approaches into different groups. Furthermore, researchers have attempted to build up the connections between learning approaches and specific personal values. For example, as referred by Matthews et al. [ 3 ] and Tarabashkina [ 10 ], personal values such as achievement and power were related to the achieving approach, security and tradition values to the surface approach, and self-direction and universalism to the deep learning approach. In addition, this relationship was confirmed by a number of studies with some variations.

The values occupy a pre-eminent position on the agenda of researchers in education and many other domains as they impact behaviour, attitudes, expectations and all the other personal characteristics and constructs. Hence, this paper seeks to contribute by reviewing the available literature on the role of personal values concerning learning approaches and student achievements. The review centres on the following given objectives.

To investigate the role of students’’ personal values in their choice of learning approaches;
To investigate the impact of personal values on one’s academic achievement;
To investigate the importance of developing individual’s personal values as a part of their academic life;
To investigate how one’s personal values shape the learning community around that person and vice versa.

2. Background Literature

The background literature aims to synthesise the most relevant research outcomes for the main topic of study under the four main areas: personal values, personal value theories, value education and learning approaches. The concept of personal values is quite closely connected with value theories and value education. In reality, they are inseparable and cannot be treated separately since they are branches of the same root. About the very same idea, to define, describe and to understand personal values, several frameworks have been used by the researchers. Thus, the historical evolution of personal values can be identified through the presented frameworks. Moreover, as the literature suggests, through empirical evidence, there exists a relationship between personal values and students’ learning. Hence, uncovering the background literature through the above four areas are important for the total comprehension of the reader.

2.1. Personal Values

As a whole, personal values significantly influence all aspects of one’s life. It is also obvious that values contribute to the building of one’s personal and social identity. Understanding the concept of personal values is indeed a complex process. Over the past years, it has been viewed diversely analysing from the individual level and up to organisational, institutional, social and cultural levels [ 2 , 11 , 12 ], resulting in several definitions addressing different scopes.

Personal values or individual values are the values to which an individual is committed and which influences his behaviour [ 13 ]. As Ledden et al. [ 14 ] view, value perceptions are the result of a cognitive trade-off between benefits and sacrifices. According to Rokeach [ 7 ], a value is a long term belief that a certain path or purpose of existence is preferable from the social and personal point of view over another one in the opposite [ 2 ]. Furthermore, values can be referred to as interests, desires, goals, needs and standards of preference [ 3 ]. (Ros [ 15 ] supports the same concept and states, “a value is a desirable state, object, goal or behaviour transcending specific situations and applied as normative standard to judge and to choose among alternative modes of behaviour” [ 2 , 15 ].

Moving a little from the basic components mentioned in the previous definitions, Anana and Nique [ 8 ] say that a value is a reference people use to judge themselves and others or to influence the values, attitudes and actions of other people, such as children. People who use the features obtained through the sense organs in defining other beings can benefit from the impressions they have emotionally in attributing importance to that being and appraising it [ 16 ]. These emotion-based impressions are generally called “values”. Another definition suggests that values are systematic and, to some extent, precise ideas that ensure the interaction of an individual with the environment [ 17 ]). Regarding the concept of personal values, Mashlah [ 5 ] and Daniela et al. (2013) [ 2 ] refer to Schwartz and Bilsky’s [ 18 ] and Schwartz’s [ 19 ] definition of values as a combination of five main features: values are (a) concepts or beliefs (b) about desirable end states or behaviours (c) that transcend specific situations, (d) guide the selection or evaluation of behaviour and events and (e) are ordered by relative importance. Analytical observation on the definitions of values shows that they are more or less diverse in meanings. Basically, terms such as interests, beliefs, desires and behaviour have been used in common in definitions. However, when focused, it is evident that values have been defined as concerning the cognitive, affective and behavioural aspects of an individual.

In contrast to the above, Ledden [ 14 ] calls attention to another two important points referring to the relevant literature. Firstly, based on the literary evidence, researchers state that value’s loose definition and the diverse nomenclature used by authors have collectively led to some authors using the term value interchangeably with concepts such as satisfaction, quality and values, particularly with the personal values that guide human behaviour such as beliefs of right and wrong. Secondly, as Ledden states [ 14 ], despite the consensus on terms and definition of values, the literature evidences some confusion in differentiating between the concept of the value and the notion of values. The argument is supported with an important distinction between value (singular) and values (plural) marked by Holbrook [ 20 ], defining the former as a preference judgment and the latter as the criteria by which people make such preference judgments; thus, value is related to, but distinct from, the concept of values. In a general sense, this diversity possibly emerges through the variations in values referred to in different research domains.

Adhering to the research outcomes, Branson et al. [ 4 ] discusses the adoption of values by a person. As explained by values theory, a person’s values are dependent upon his or her consciousness and those values are unique to the person. Research shows that people do not learn values, but rather, they unconsciously adopt values. For example, values are adopted subliminally rather than being consciously selected and deliberately adopted by the individual [ 4 ]. Each person sees a unique and specific view of their world due to the influence of his or her conscious perceptions.

Turning to the historical traces of debates and discussions on personal values, values are abstract concepts that have been studied since ancient times [ 21 ] and can be traced back to the lessons from Aristotle, Plato and Socrates [ 15 ]. Evidently, research into value education has been carried out for almost centuries [ 3 ] and continues today. As a result, several definitions and models have been suggested and empirically studied over the past years. Despite the key components and focuses, several models are found frequently cited in the research literature. As Hanel, Litzellachner and Maio [ 11 ] suggested, the following are at the forefront of all the other individual value models.

Spranger’s (1921)—Model of types of people;
Rokeach’s (1973)—Instrumental and terminal values;
Schwartz’s—The Schwartz (1992) theory of basic human values;
Gouvela’s (2013)—Functional theory of values.

Value theories focused on values at the individual level as well values can also be described on a cultural level. As Hanel, Litzellachner and Maio [ 11 ] refer, three prominent approaches of this type were proposed by Inglehart, Hofstede and Schwartz [ 19 ].

Particularly for this article, Schwartz’s model of human values is adopted as the fundamental theory to discuss the issues highlighted in the objectives since it has been referred to as the theoretical ground of a number of recent research studies on personal values in a variety of contexts. Specifically in the studies which examined how the basic values relate to various attitudes, opinions, behaviours, personalities and background characteristics. In addition, it has been used in hundreds of studies that assessed value transmission and development in an individual from childhood to adolescence and value change over time. Moreover, the theory itself concerns the basic values that people in all cultures recognize [ 19 ]. Thus, it can be accepted as universally applicable without any bias. Additionally, considering the very diversity of meanings of the construct of values, the sociopsychological aspects of values are focused on throughout this article.

2.2. Personal Value Theories—Schwartz Theory of Human Values

Values can range from the simplest forms, such as punctuality and kindness, to pretentious forms such as self-direction, universalism and conformity. Over the past years, various value models have been proposed and empirically supported [ 11 ]. All of them have often defined human values as abstract ideals that guide people’s behaviour and are crucial for explaining social and personal organizations and tracing their changes due to various factors. Among the different value models that have been suggested, the Schwartz [ 18 ] theory of basic human values is found frequently cited in the literature.

As Schwartz described, there are six main features of values according to the theory [ 18 , 19 ]: values are beliefs linked inextricably to affect, values refer to desirable goals that motivate action, values transcend specific actions and situations, values serve as standards, values are ordered by importance relative to one another and the relative importance of multiple values are guides to action. These six features apply to all values. Furthermore, theory distinguishes ten basic values (value types) which encompass the range of motivationally distinct values recognized across cultures. These values are likely to be universal because they are grounded in universal requirements of human existence. However, they differ in their motivational content. The definitions of the ten values in terms of the broad goals they express in Table 1 .

Values and the motivational goals—the Schwartz theory of personal values.

He presented the structural model of basic values which takes the form of a circle. Complementary values, i.e., values that are similar to motivational content, are located side by side on this circle while competing values are located at opposing sides [ 18 , 19 ]. The closer any two values in either direction around the circle, the more similar their underlying motivations; the more distant, the more antagonistic their motivations [ 19 ]. It seems that the whole set of ten values relates to each other closely or distantly and by that mean they may interrelate with any other variable such as behaviour, attitude, age, etc. ( Figure 1 ).

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Theoretical model of relations among ten motivational types of values.

2.3. Value Education

The concept of values has been defined differently in the literature depending on the contexts and the situations. However, along with the rapid changes in the world, the concepts of values and value education have gained renewed attention due to the increased social immorality [ 21 ]. Value education can address different forms and definitions. In religious senses, it is most possibly defined as moral and spiritual development. To sociological concepts, it can be termed as the part of socialisation and personality development or the transmission of cultural elements. In the dimension of education, it is addressed through citizenship education. However, in the most general sense, value education stresses the process by which people develop moral values and transfer them through factors such as social relationships, religion and education.

The values, attitudes and personal qualities of young people and the role of the school in spiritual, moral, social and cultural development have received renewed attention in recent years [ 21 , 22 , 23 ]. As education is a personality-building process [ 24 ], school education is challenged by preparing students to face the complexities of future life. Rapidly changing socioeconomic structures and their consequences in terms of patterns of work, family life and social relationships requires an educational response. In that context, experts have recognised the 21st century school curriculum as the most influential mode of transferring values to the younger generation other than the family and other immediate social units. Sahin [ 16 ] suggests that implicit or planned values education in schools plays an active role in transferring values from society to society. By its definition, value education refers to those pedagogies that educators use to create enriching learning experiences for students and addresses issues related to character formation [ 25 ] and moral development. Moral values are the values that make individuals distinguish between what is good or bad and right or wrong and simply it gives the ideas about the good personal and social life. Halstead and Tylor [ 21 ] refer to a discussion document on Spiritual and Moral Development and highlight that the moral values that school should promote are telling the truth, keeping promises, respecting the rights and property of others, acting considerately towards others, helping those less fortunate and weaker than ourselves, taking personal responsibility for one’s actions and self-discipline. Moreover, schools reject bullying, cheating, deceit, cruelty, irresponsibility and dishonesty.

Sahin [ 16 ] has identified the four main characteristics of values education as:

To raise individuals’ awareness of universal (ethical), cultural values, and their importance;
To relate democratic attitudes and tolerance to multiculturalism;
To evaluate all values with the criteria of improving people’s living conditions and facilities;
To turn life into knowledge and/or knowledge into life considering concrete problems related to ethical values.

Sahin [ 16 ] views the main purpose of values education as to make values permanent behaviours in students. Providing students with the knowledge and insight into values and beliefs that enables them to reflect on their experience in a way that develop their spiritual awareness and self-knowledge, teaches them the principles which distinguish right from wrong and teaches students to appreciate their cultural traditions and the diversity and richness of other cultures are among the basic functional aspects of value education provided through the school education [ 21 ]. Accordingly, the particular theme of value education is directly related to inculcating moral values in students, and it can be identified as another phase of personal value development since the same aspects are named and described in personal value models and frameworks in more or less similar terms. For example, the features that institutions wish to promote through moral or value education are discussed in the ten basic values in Schwartz theory of basic values under the themes of conformity, benevolence, tradition, security and universalism. As Schwartz [ 19 ] views, benevolence and conformity values both promote cooperative and supportive social relations and both values may motivate the same helpful act, separately or together. Traditional values imply one’s affection towards religious beliefs and respect for tradition and customs while security values inspire one’s need for safety and harmony. Hence, through value education, it develops values such as conformity, security, universalism and benevolence.

In developing values in individuals, it is widely recognised that schools are not the only nor are they the greatest influence on the values, attitudes and personal qualities of young people, but parents, communities and other agencies are also influential [ 21 ]. The early-stage value development through the family, neighbours, practice of religion, culture and nursery forms the foundation for the personal values system that one holds. It can be further sharpened through the formal and informal educational and cultural practices in the school or any other institution.

2.4. Learning Approaches

Approaches to learning mainly focus on how children engage in learning referring to the use of skills and behaviours. In addition, they are discussed incorporating emotional, behavioural and cognitive domains. Learning is a process of changing behaviour through experiences and is relatively a permanent product. Hence, it is important to understand student learning approaches to improve and maintain the quality of the learning experience. Beyaztas and Senemoglu [ 26 ] define learning approaches in terms of how a learner’s intentions, behaviours and study habits change according to their perception of a learning task to the context which the learner regards.

According to Lietz and Matthews [ 27 ] two major perspectives have guided theory and research into student learning: The first is The Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) rooted in North America, and the second is The Students’ Approaches to Learning (SAL) that is prominent in Europe and Australia/Southeast Asia. In parallel to that, Matthews et al. (2007) [ 3 ] cite Biggs’ [ 28 ] findings on Asian student learning approaches, and according to it, learning is based on two types: the Information Processing Approach and the Contextually and Experientially Based Learning Approach. The above findings specifically refer to the geographical region and it is reasonable to pose the argument that the variation patterns in learning approaches are existing to the sociogeographical factors such as country, region and culture.

Biggs [ 29 , 30 ] specified three distinct approaches (see Table 2 ) to learning namely, The Surface, The Deep and The Achieving approaches to learning [ 3 , 27 ]. In addition, each approach is composed of a motivation that directed learning and a strategy for the implementation of the learning approach [ 3 ].

Motivations and strategies in student approaches to learning.

Note. MNNote. Matthews et al. (2007) [ 3 ] following Biggs [ 29 ] and Murray-Harvey [ 31 ].

Li’s [ 32 ] perspective on student learning approaches is quite different from the above and states that students are smart in different ways and have different learning approaches. According to Na Li, the two major perspectives of learning are the constructivist and student-centred learning approaches: Inquiry-based learning, Problem-based learning, the Situated and embodied cognition model, Self-regulated learning and Cognitive apprenticeship model and Technology-enhanced learning approaches.

Research into learning approaches has focused on studying the impact of background factors such as gender, sociocultural backgrounds, discipline area, personal values and the learning culture of students. As highlighted by Lietz and Matthews [ 27 ], Cano-Garcia [ 33 ] has shown that older female students tended to score higher on the deep and achieving approaches to learning than younger male students. In addition, studies of Jones et al. [ 34 ] and Smith and Miller [ 35 ] reflected strong relationships between learning approaches and academic disciplines. Beyaztas and Senemoglu [ 26 ] reveal another dimension of research on learning approaches in relation to the examination on students’ learning and studying behaviour towards exams and exam types. Results of these interventions revealed that students’ learning approaches change according to the examination type they were preparing for and Ramsden [ 36 ] has proposed strategic learning approaches for students who have more exam-oriented study behaviours.

Another major area that researchers concentrated is changes in the learning approach over time. A number of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies have investigated changes in learning approaches over time [ 3 , 10 , 37 ]. Both Lietz and Matthews [ 27 ] and Tarabashkina and Lietz [ 10 ] refer to the same group of studies that investigated changes in learning approaches over time. As they arranged into the chronological order the earliest, Watkins and Hattie’s [ 38 ] study on a sample of undergraduate students found that the longer students had studied, the more they displayed characteristics of the deep approach to learning. Contrary to the results of their first study, Watkins and Hattie’s longitudinal study [ 39 ] showed no evidence of students’ deep learning approaches intensifying over time. However, Biggs [ 29 ] reported a general decline in the deep approach from the first to final year of study in a sample of undergraduate students in Australia. However, no significant changes were observed for other learning approaches. In the study by Gow and Kember [ 40 ], results showed that older students used the deep approach significantly more often than younger students. In addition, students at the beginning of their studies appeared to prefer an achieving approach compared to students who were further advanced in their studies. In addition, the more time that had elapsed since leaving school, the fewer the number of students who displayed characteristics of the surface approach. In another study by Kember [ 41 ], it was uncovered that younger students showed a preference for a more superficial approach in a comparison of first, second and third-year students. In contrast to the results of his study in 1990 [ 40 ], he found that first-year students showed significantly higher scores on the deep approach to learning than second and third-year students. Zeegers’s [ 42 ] study on a class of chemistry students over 30 months has shown a significant decline in the achieving strategy and a significant increase in the surface strategy over the time of the study. For the deep approach, no statistically significant changes emerged over time. Another study carried out by Matthews [ 3 ] on the same issue discovered that students’ approaches to learning generally became deeper over time. In contrast, Cano’s [ 33 ] study observed a significant decline from junior to senior high school with regards to the deep and surface learning approaches both in boys and girls.

In general, preference for a deep learning approach has emerged as the major concern of all studies, and there is no specific pattern of applying a particular approach for learning among the students. Hence, there may be some other background factors influencing the selection and application as well as the changing of a specific approach to learning. In the point of factors affecting students’ learning approaches, Beyaztas and Senemoglu [ 26 ] summarize the 3P model (Presage, Process and Product), and according to it, prior knowledge, abilities, preferred ways of learning, values and expectations, teaching context (including the curriculum) and teaching methods affect the student’s selection.

As revealed through the research studies, approaches to learning are probable to change in response to gender, ability, formal teaching authority, time, personal values [ 3 , 27 ], the requirements of and as an adaptation to new environments, the learning culture and the academic discipline and its nature [ 10 , 27 ]. Additionally, as Beyaztas and Senemoglu [ 26 ] state, referring to an early study of Ramsden [ 36 ], students’ perception of their teachers and departments also have important effects on their learning approaches. In addition, the curriculum and sociocultural environment also may have an effect on selecting the learning approach. Thus, it can be concluded that students’ preference for learning approach is influenced by several factors and they may be inborn or situational. In other words, learning approached may be a result of a combination of several internal and external factors including personal value traits.

3. Methodological Design

This research is based on a systematic review of the literature with a narrative summary that exclusively depended on online databases. The predetermined selection criteria, which are given in Table 3 , were applied during the database search screening of the text titles, abstracts and whole texts.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Following the above-mentioned criteria, full texts that were reported within 20 years were purposely selected due to the availability of a limited number of accessible resources to retrieve the literature. In relation to the year of publication, the search action was conducted with the use of online databases. As the main sources of data, Google Scholar, JSTOR and Elsevier were used. The ResearchGate database was also used for the search of resources.

The comprehensive search resources were completed based on a wide range of key terms and phrases including “values”, “personal values”, “learning approaches”, “learning communities” and “learning approaches—academic achievement and value education”. However, similar terms that are often used interchangeably in the literature were also used. In particular, with regards to the concepts of personal values and value education, they have also been searched through the terms “humanistic values”, “soft skills”, “social skills” and “moral education”.

As the search action resulted in a limited number of appropriate and accessible sources, the reference section of the found texts were studied in the search for more relevant texts. After the exclusion of sources that did not satisfy the criteria in Table 3 , 38 texts were selected for analysis. The content of the selected resources was studied and analysed in detail. Then, the required data were organized under four main themes following the study objectives.

4.1. Objective 1: To Investigate the Role of Students’ Personal Values in Their Choice of Learning Approaches

In the most general sense, approaches to learning describe what a student does when he/she is learning and why he/she should do it. In other words, it is the way that students perceive and value the learning process and how they behave during the process. As suggested by the aforementioned facts and information, education correlates with personal values. Hence, a considerable number of educational studies have been carried out to examine the composition and structure of personal values and their relationships with learning approaches. Values are considered to be precursors as well as predictors of behaviour [ 3 ]. In the same way, studies have proven that a tendency towards certain types of behaviours depends strongly on the structure of one’s values. Conversely, learning can be seen as a type of individual-specific behavioural pattern. In that respect, it is justifiable to accept that there is a relationship between personal values and the learning approaches of students. In addition, the values are believed to be influenced by background factors such as religion, culture, political factors, age and many others. Assuming that they also definitely influence in preference of a student’s learning approach, research into learning approaches has focused on a variety of backgrounds. According to Lietz and Matthews [ 27 ], research studies have focused on studying the differences in choice of learning approach and personal values relationships depending on gender, discipline area of study, prior performance and the experiences of students, especially the students who undertake higher education in another country. With regards to personal values, researchers in this context have confirmed that values are correlated with different learning approaches.

The influence of personal values on life goals are better described as follows: “values refer to desirable goals that motivate action” [ 19 ]. Wilding and Andrew’s [ 43 ] study results of “Life goals, approaches to study and performance in an undergraduate cohort” can be discussed taking that as the ground. According to them, the deep approach and the surface approach are the two main approaches to studying that have been distinguished by several researchers. In addition, an achieving or strategic approach employs either deep or surface strategies, depending on the demands of the task. The research aimed to investigate factors contributing to the choice of the preferred study approach at university and relations between these factors and academic performance. Based on the results, as the researchers state, this study has shown that approaches to study are related to wider attitudes to life or the general life goals and relations were found to be consistent with the deep approach being associated with altruistic life goals and the surface approach being associated with wealth and status life goals. The achieving approach was related to both types of life goal, but more strongly to wealth and status life goals.

The most frequently referred research of Matthews [ 3 ] on sojourner students in Australia has found interesting relationships between values and learning approaches. From the three pairs of canonical variables that emerged out of the analysis the first pair of variables illustrated that students with clearly defined value structure had equally well-defined learning motivations and strategies. The second pair of variables showed that students who had low integrity values showed a higher preference for surface or superficial learning. In contrast, the third pair of variables indicated that students who had a lesser emphasis on values associated with the Confucian ethos showed a strong preference for the deep strategy [ 3 ].

In the study of “Values and Learning approaches of students at an international University”, Matthews, Lietz and Darmawan [ 3 ] relate the ten values postulated by Schwartz et al. [ 18 ] to Biggs’ [ 29 ] six subscales and the relationships between values and approaches to learning has been estimated by canonical correlation analysis. It has revealed that values can be linked to learning approaches even in a situation where students have left their home countries to undertake tertiary studies in a new social, cultural and educational environment. There, the results have been interpreted to the higher-order values: self-aggrandisement, conservatism, self-directedness and benevolent change, which were initially termed as self-enhancement, self-transcendence, openness to change and conservation, respectively, as proposed by Schwartz [ 18 ]. Four distinct pairings between values and learning approaches were established: (a) self-aggrandisement (Achievement and power values) is linked to the achievement learning approach, (b) conservatism (universalism and benevolence values) relates to the surface learning approach, (c) self-directedness (self-direction and stimulation values) is linked to the deep learning approach and (d) benevolent change (conformity, tradition and security values) is related to the learning strategies variables were emerged as the results.

In terms of the main research question, the impact of students’ personal values on learning approaches and changes in them over time of Lietz and Matthews [ 27 ] longitudinal study on “The Effects of College Students’ Personal Values on Changes in Learning Approaches” has given mixed results. The three-year study results have shown no changes within students in the deep and surface approaches to learning but a significant decline for the achieving approach, particularly for students who previously experienced a more formal teaching authority. As they described, the students who identified to a greater extent with the achievement, hedonism and security values have demonstrated a higher achieving approach to learning at the start of their higher education. Conversely, but in line with expectations, students who valued having fun and a good time more than other students have displayed fewer characteristics of the achieving approach to learning. However, none of the personal values were found to influence how the achieving approach to learning changed over time. Based on the research outcome they have concluded that, while personal values appear to explain differences in learning approaches at one point in time they do not seem to contribute to explaining changes in learning approaches over time. In that case, as explained in a similar study by Matthews (2007) [ 3 ] students are likely to change both their personal values and learning approaches due to the influence of the new environment or it may result to pursue their education.

Parallel to the theme of the above studies, Tarabashkina and Lietz [ 10 ] carried out a longitudinal research study on “The impact of values and learning approaches on student achievement: Gender and academic discipline influences” using a cohort of international students who started their three-year Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science degrees in September 2004 at a university in Germany. According to the results, hedonism and achievement were consistently related to the achieving approach over three years, whereas the achievement value probably had a large positive effect on the achieving approach, and hedonism (that is, the tendency to have fun) was negatively related to this approach across all occasions. Hedonism was also consistently and negatively linked to the deep approach throughout all years, whereas self-direction had a positive impact on this approach over a two-year period. Self-direction emerged as a constant predictor of the surface approach, although in the opposite direction to this effect for the deep approach.

Accordingly, the reported literature provides insights that the personal values and learning approaches are two components that occur at the same time with parallel construction. In addition, it establishes the relationship regarding how personal values are linked with different learning approaches and how these interrelationships change over time.

4.2. Objective 2: To Investigate the Impact of Personal Values on One’s Academic Achievement

Personal characteristics such as skills, abilities and values, academic adaptability, concern on learning objectives, decision making, innovation and communication are some of the main features of any valid evaluation criteria. When elaborating on the state of personal values in line with its impact on one’s academic achievement, knowledge as a human-specific activity is in direct relation with the way a person through his values perceives the world, the phenomena and events Daniela et al. [ 2 ]. The values favoured by different individuals can be more or less equal or different. Similarly, within each unique and specific view of the world, each person attributes different values to the same experience or the same value to different experiences [ 4 ]. Accordingly, the existing similarities and differences in values cause much diversity in behaviour. Typically, human beings tend to adapt their values according to the circumstances. In addition, it can be assumed that the values do reflect themselves through all the activities of individuals. Identifying the worth of studying these variations, in addition to exploring the link between values and learning approaches, the relationships between personal values and academic achievement, including the effect of factors such as gender and academic discipline, has been carried out by scholars. As the literature notes, the achievement motive and achievement goal are different in their nature, but they both share a commonality in terms of the role that individuals’ values may play as their underlying antecedents [ 44 ]. The argument is further confirmed citing Kaplan and Maehr [ 45 ], and they contend that individuals’ achievement goals are associated with their values. Similarly, values are considered desirable goals and individuals work hard to pursue them. Hence it is justifiable to say that in the academic setting students personal values or their personal goals substantially influence the academic achievement of the students.

Among the several research studies made to study the impact of values on academic achievements, Bala [ 46 ] discusses the values and adjustment problem of high achievers and low achievers based on a sample of 100 students from two senior secondary schools. There, the researcher has considered values in terms of theoretical, economic, aesthetic, social, political and religious values and adjustments related to social, health and emotional, school and home values. Achieving one of the specific objectives to determine the nature of the values of High and Low achievers, it arrives at several conclusions: (a) Higher achievers are more theoretical and social in comparison to low achievers and they have a dominant interest in knowledge, learning and believe more in kindness, charity and love; (b) High achievers and low achievers are similar as far as religious value is concerned; (c) Low achievers are more economic in comparison to high achievers. They believe more in materialistic life than high achievers; (d) High achievers are more political in their approach in comparison to low achievers; (e) Low achievers are superior on the aesthetic value in comparison to high achievers.

There has been little research to study the effect of a school’s disciplinary climate on improving students’ learning and academic achievement. However, the available past and present research support the view that student learning is immediately affected by the nature of the school’s disciplinary climate [ 4 ] as it controls students’ conduct by restricting the engagement in misbehaviour during school time and, thus, enhance student learning.

According to Ma and Willms [ 47 ], research findings based on a sample of grade 8 students in the US, the two most important disciplinary factors that affect academic achievement pertain to whether students were concerned about class disruptions, the proportion of students who talked to a school counsellor or teacher about disciplinary matters and the effect of the teacher–student relationship. As they revealed, with respect to the effects of indiscipline on academic achievement, the disciplinary measure that had the strongest relationship to academic achievement pertains mainly to classroom disruption. Additionally, they say that the effect of behaviour concern, which is a more traditional indicator of disciplinary climate, was negatively related to academic success. As they have found that students’ indiscipline has a significant detrimental effect on their academic achievement, to improve academic achievement from the perspective of a disciplinary climate, providing an orderly classroom environment has been suggested as a remedy.

Research conducted at the individual level has consistently shown a correlation between low cognitive ability, poor academic performances, learning disabilities, delinquency and particularly the relationship between academic performances and discipline [ 47 ]. In schools where advantaged students are concentrated, there will be fewer discipline problems and higher achievement levels as they completely target academic success rather than other issues, whereas schools serving disadvantaged students will have even worse discipline problems and lower levels of academic achievement. Ma and Willms [ 47 ] support that claim with Hawkins and Lishner [ 48 ], who have framed the relationship between academic performance and discipline as a circular process. School misconduct in the early elementary grades, combined with low ability or learning disabilities, are antecedents of poor academic performance in the late grades; poor academic performance in the late elementary grades leads to a low commitment to educational activities, disaffection toward school and an association with delinquent peers. These factors lead to dropping out or to delinquent behaviour. Value education is another concerned faculty that is gaining much concern in education. The results of a study on students attending character education and some of which did not have shown that the scores of those who underwent character education were higher than the scores of others [ 49 ]. As a whole, according to these authors, schools’ or any other learning community’s disciplinary climate acknowledges that better-behaved students generally are higher academic achievers. On that basis, as highlighted in the aforementioned discussion, if personal values are considered as abstract ideals that guide people’s behaviour, then there should be a correlation between delinquent behavioural patterns, cognitive ability level, academic performance and the personal values of an individual.

Liem et al. [ 44 ] examined the relationships between values, achievement motives, achievement goals and academic achievement among Indonesian high school students. There, in terms of the relationships between values and achievement motives, findings indicate that security and conformity values are positive predictors of the social-oriented achievement motive; self-direction is a positive predictor of the individual-oriented achievement motive, whereas hedonism is a negative predictor of both achievement motive orientations. There is also evidence for the direct effects of values on academic achievement. How personal values influenced students’ learning approaches and in turn, how they related to students’ achievement has been examined several times, and they have resulted in more or less similar results, as in Liem et al. [ 44 ]. Accordingly, Wilding and Andrew [ 43 ], based on their study cohort behaviour, have observed that those with less interest in wealth and status life goals produced better academic results. In other words, the successful students would seem to apply themselves more (or more effectively) to the immediate task rather than wider ambitions. Hence, they concluded the two variables associated with better performance were a self-reported achieving approach to learning, reflecting good organization and a systematic programme of study and a lower emphasis on wealth and status achievement in life. Furthermore, they stress that Biggs’ achievment approach to learning has consistently been shown to be positively related to academic performance, but neither the surface approach nor the deep approach has shown any such consistent relation. In contrast to that, the results of a study on a sample of university students by Tarabashkina and Lietz [ 10 ] showed that specific combinations of values were related to each learning approach and their relationship with the academic achievement of students over three years. In general, certain consistencies of these relationships have been observed throughout the study period. The deep and achieving learning approaches were associated with higher achievement, whereas students who displayed more characteristics of the surface learning approach had lower academic performance. Through statistical analysis, they built up the positive and negative relationships between personal values and learning approach: (a) Achieving learning approach—self-direction, achievement and hedonism; (b) Deep learning approach—self direction and hedonism; (c) Surface learning approach—conformity and self-direction. As they found, if the deep and achieving learning approaches were associated with higher achievement, then it can be assumed that self-direction, achievement and hedonism values are consistently associated with academic achievements, affecting them negatively and/or positively.

Similarly, the research findings of the study on learning approaches of successful students done using freshman students ranked in the top one percent portion in a university placement exam (2013) in Ankara by Beyaztaş & Senemoğlu [ 50 ] were supported with the similar research literature and has shown that students can enhance their level of success by increased use of the deep learning approach and decreased use of the surface approach. Furthermore, references made in Watkins’s [ 51 ] meta-analysis of 60 studies addressing learning approaches and academic achievement found a negative relationship between academic achievement and surface learning approaches in 28 studies, a positive relationship between academic achievement and deep learning approaches in 37 studies and a positive relationship between academic achievement and strategic learning approach in 32 studies. Additionally, in a study by Senemoğlu [ 52 ] a positive and meaningful relationship was found between Turkish and American students’ perceived level of success and learning approaches. This study reported that students who perceived themselves to be successful tended to adopt deep and strategic learning approaches, whereas students who thought they were less successful used surface learning approaches in both countries. According to the outcomes of the above-mentioned research studies, any consistent assumptions cannot be made about the correlation between the effectiveness of the learning approaches and students’ academic achievements or about how learning approaches influence academic performance. As emerged in the previous research literature, students’ learning behaviour along with personal values may change according to the circumstances and, in turn, it makes a direct effect on the students’ academic achievement.

4.3. Objective 3: To Investigate the Importance of Developing Individual’s Personal Values as a Part of Their Academic Life

Education is a combined process in which the advancement of knowledge, development of skills and the acquisition of beliefs and habits progress from an earlier age. Education providers, especially schools, play an important role in helping young people to develop and manage their physical, social and emotional well-being, and to live and work with others in different contexts. Specifically, they are partly responsible for enlightening an individual in both personal and professional areas. In that sense, personal value development is given a prominent place in most of academic interventions since they are considered as the concepts of beliefs that guide behaviours, attitudes and social norms. Education is naturally and inevitably directly related to a person’s goals and values [ 53 ]. The objective of developing an individual’s personal values as a part of academic life has been discussed, mainly concerning the theme of value education in many of the studies. In general value, education occupies an impressive place in contemporary society and school education is the most influential means of developing an individual and the schools are meeting places of value and are also full of values [ 54 ].

Values education itself has been defined simply as a purposive attempt to teach what is good or bad. As Iscan and Senemoglu [ 49 ] define it, values education is an open initiative aimed to provide instruction in values, value development or value actualization. According to the definition underpinning the Value Education Study, Australia [ 55 ], ‘Values education’ is broader and refers to any explicit and/or implicit school-based activity to promote student understanding and knowledge of values and to inculcate the skills and dispositions of students so they can enact particular values as individuals and as members of the wider community. Beena [ 56 ] says that value education given at schools is much concerned with striving for personal wholeness as well as generating a responsible attitude towards others and an understanding of wrong and right behaviour. For Thornberg and Oguz [ 57 ], all kinds of activities in schools in which students learn or develop values and morality are often referred to as values education. It seems that through the value education at school, children are encouraged to explore the powers of good and bad while unconsciously setting appropriate limits to behaviour. In relation to the Schwartz theory of personal values, the school value education promotes the values (benevolence, universalism, tradition, conformity, security) that primarily regulate how one relates socially to others and affects their interests. Security and universalism values are boundary values primarily concerned with others’ interests, but their goals also regulate the pursuit of their own interests [ 19 ]. Particularly, schools being sites for ethical practices, it seems that they focus much on social value development rather than personal development. According to Kunduroglu & Babadogan [ 53 ], that may be because the values students get with values education affect firstly their families and circle of friends, then their acquaintances and at the end, all the community.

As Thornberg and Oguz [ 57 ] emphasize, referring to several studies, value education is accomplished in two distinct ways such as explicit values education (schools’ official curriculum of what and how to teach values and morality, including teachers’ explicit intentions and practices of values education and implicit values education (associated with a hidden curriculum and implicit values, embedded in school and classroom practices). Bergmark [ 54 ] also mentions that schools are full of implicit and explicit values which shape school leaders’, teachers’ and students’ perceptions and actions. Furthermore, Thornberg and Oguz [ 57 ] mention two general approaches to values education as described in the literature. The first is the Traditional Approach: adult transmission of the morals of society through character education, direct teaching, exhortation, and the use of rewards and punishments. The aim is to teach and discipline students to develop good character and virtues (being honest, hardworking, obeying legitimate authority, kind, patriotic and responsible) and to conform to the dominant values, legitimate rules and the authority of society. In contrast, the Progressive or Constructivist Approach emphasises children’s active construction of moral meaning and development of a personal commitment to principles of fairness and concern for the welfare of others through processes of social interaction and moral discourse. Reasoning and explanations, deliberative discussion about moral dilemmas and participation in decision-making processes are viewed as typical methods for this approach. The aim is to promote moral autonomy, rational thinking, moral reasoning skills and democratic values and competence among the students.

Values education has always been a part of the school curriculum in many countries aiming to inculcate religious beliefs, moral values, duties and social responsibilities as the social values are of crucial importance for an individual’s life [ 53 ]. Therefore, the personal value development of students is important as it is beneficial for the individual in academic, professional and social life. Academic development achieved without personal value development is worthless because individuals who are not disciplined find it difficult to survive in the long run of professional and social life. They lack positive qualities such as punctuality, flexibility, the willingness to learn, a friendly nature, an eagerness to help others, sharing and caring and many more. In addition, they do not believe in themselves and others and lack self-confidence, self-efficacy and self-courage, which are considered the main components of personal development. Obviously, educating people on an only cognitive level is incomplete and not functional [ 53 ]. Henceforth, academic growth must be supplemented with personal value development to strengthen the individual to fit in the competitive society and do away with negative behavioural traits. That gives the sense that better personalities yield positive results in academics, social and professional life.

The research study by Iscan and Senemoglu [ 49 ] on the effectiveness of values education curriculum for fourth graders to equip students with the values of “universalism” and “benevolence” on students’ value-related cognitive behaviours, affective characteristics and performances has resulted in important findings. The experimental group of the study has shown higher values-related cognitive behaviour acquisition level and used more expressions reflecting values in the interviews during and after the implementation of the program. Additionally, the experimental group has displayed a larger number of positive value-related behaviours during the study than the control group. In parallel to the particular study, Iscan and Senemoglu [ 49 ] highlight the the importance of value-based educational interventions. As they revealed, exposing students to such experiences may make them aware of moral issues, establish empathy with others and understand their moral values, decreasing bullying and violence. Furthermore, they have made students more tolerant, polite, compassionate and forgiving, and [ 58 ] it has led to positive changes in students’ respect and responsibility levels along with a decrease in unacceptable behaviour. A similar study on “Values Education Program Integrated with the 4th Grade Science and Technology Course’’ [ 53 ] has revealed that at the end of the 6-week intervention period, students in the experimental group improved their perspective on the values, being more open-minded, unbiased and scientific. In addition, they have interrogated values concepts and developed positive behaviours for the relevant values.

As a whole, it proves that value education is an essential component in the general teaching-learning procedure since it highly encourages positive personal quality development and value gain which in turn benefit the whole community, society and the world.

4.4. Objective 4: To Investigate How One’s Personal Value Shape the Learning Community around That Person and Vice-Versa

Definitions for learning communities that have been given by a variety of journals, top universities and educational experts indicate a common set of characteristics. Considering them all together, a learning community can be defined as the same groups of students taking the same subjects or studying in the same class together. In addition, they see and meet each other frequently, share the same learning experiences, work across boundaries, spend a considerable amount of time together and engage in common academic activities in two or more classes as a specific unit. Additionally, they hold common goals, characterize collaboration, peer review and relationship building.

Sometimes the learning community can be the whole class or a group of students. Otherwise, it can be the whole learning institution: a school, university or any other institution where the individuals of the community develop their intellectual and professional skills and abilities while improving socioethical values. In addition, they work collaboratively as a single unit for achieving a set of common academic goals, sharing and bearing all kinds of similarities and differences [ 58 ]. In a more formal sense, according to the literary evidence, developing and implementing an intentional learning community (LC) has emerged as a popular method for improving the quality of the undergraduate experience at a range of higher educational institutions. Learning communities have a long history in higher education, dating from the 1920s when Alexander Meiklejohn introduced the “Experimental College” at the University of Wisconsin [ 59 ].

It is known that, from early ages, pupils are greatly influenced by their peers [ 21 ], and this has been empirically studied. Zhao and Kuh [ 58 ] state that students who actively participate in various out-of-class activities are more likely to connect with an affinity group of peers, which is important for student retention, success and personal development. Peer communities sometimes encourage and sometimes discourage value development as the students encountered different learning activities. Ma and Willms [ 47 ] view peer relationships are associated with delinquency in early adolescence. So, the potential role of peers as an influential factor on others in the process of values formation at the schools has been studied several times. In this respect, the study of Garnier and Stein [ 60 ] confirms that peer groups in which people interact and share norms and goals are another significant matter that affects the personal values of an individual. One important source of values is that of a ‘pivotal’ person: a person observed as displaying values that would produce advantageous benefits for the observer [ 4 ]. In a learning community, there is a possibility of a friend or friends becoming a pivotal person or persons other than the teacher or the instructor. Hence, it is evident that learning communities trigger personal value development through peers, their behaviours and attitudes and all the personal attributes.

To address the above features through the teaching and learning process, different approaches have been taken by the educational practitioners to figure out the best way to teach their students, and many have failed. However, some have succeeded and are still on the ground with alterations and developments. Among them, the cooperative learning strategy has continued to be developed and used by the teachers at all levels. Hence, by exposing students to collaborative or cooperative learning experience, they are encouraged to work together with colleagues to achieve common targets. As the word sense, it is not just group work but a very dynamic strategy [ 61 ] that provides room for students to experience different personalities, to promote social interaction, to identify sociocultural dynamics, to transfer ideas, and to develop group leadership skills among students. Cooperative learning is a teaching practice that breaks students into groups of three to four, with each student having a particular role within the group [ 61 ]. However, collaborative learning goes beyond working together, and it inspires self-management, self-monitoring and self-directed earning while developing a core skill required for employment [ 62 ]. In that sense, when comparing the intended outcomes of collaborative and cooperative learning approaches with the Schwartz’s [ 19 ] categorisation of values, they enhance values such as self-direction, achievement, benevolence and universalism.

Zhao and Kuh [ 58 ] refer to several studies, and according to them, most learning communities incorporate active and collaborative learning activities and promote involvement in complementary academic and social activities that extend beyond the classroom. Such approaches are linked with such positive behaviours such as increased academic effort and outcomes such as promoting openness to diversity, social tolerance and personal and interpersonal development. In parallel to that, Stassen [ 59 ] points out the results of the empirical studies collectively and show that “living-learning communities have a significant positive effect on several student outcomes, including: student gains in autonomy and independence, intellectual dispositions and orientations, and generalized personal development and socialization”. Stassen [ 59 ] mentions that students in learning communities show greater institutional commitment, greater intellectual development and opportunities to analyse and integrate ideas, greater tolerance for difference and appreciation for pluralism and demonstrate higher persistence and academic performance as measured by college grade point average.

Taken together, by taking classes together and/or engaging in peer-to-peer learning as a learning community, students get to know each other better, learn from each other and support each other. Along with that, students experience more social relationships. A connected learning environment increases the potential for academic success while creating more opportunities for students to adapt themselves to the individual needs of each other, to adjust their schedules and to work with diverse groups since learning groups are a mixture of different intellectual abilities, academic interests and goals and learning styles. Then again, social relationships established as a result of learning communities will continue through the end of the academic experience and will last even after promoting social harmony. As explained in Schwartz’s [ 1 ], benevolence values provide an internalized motivational base for voluntarily promoting the welfare of others. Equally, conformity values promote prosocial behaviour to avoid negative outcomes for oneself. Hence, both benevolence and conformity values motivate the same helpful act of promoting cooperative and supportive social relations, separately or together. As discussed above the learning communities also directly or indirectly enrich the development of values such as benevolence and conformity in learners, since they support the natural integration of academic life with social life providing opportunities to interact with a variety of individuals. In turn, the learning community will be benefited or disturbed by the certain characteristics of the personal values held by the individual.

5. Discussion & Conclusions

Based on the above literature on the themes of personal values and related directions, it is clear that there is no universally accepted definition for personal values. However, despite the diversity and gaps in the definitions, values and personal values have been viewed basically as the concepts or beliefs which are depicted through behavioural patterns, selections and personal goals. Furthermore, intrinsic and extrinsic factors including family, social and economic background, neighbourhood, religion and education have been identified as the influential factors on value formation and development. Their effect on the life of a person alternate according to the circumstances. Jardim et al. [ 63 ] identified this nature of values as the two main functions: as a motivator (materialist or humanitarian law) or as guidance (personal, social or central). Furthermore, based on the different attributes of values and priorities given to them in different contexts, they have been defined, named and grouped in various ways with more or fewer similarities to each other. However, both Schwartz [ 19 ] and Jardim [ 63 ] explained the similarities of values and value systems. As they state values have a basic universal structure and character which make them to be believed as the judgment of truths. The emphasis given to values in many areas has resulted in a number of theories and frameworks, and they have been used as the theoretical grounds to evaluate the research outcomes. According to the search results of this particular study revealed that Schwatrz theory of personal values has been frequently used in many of the recent education-based research studies in comparison to the other theories.

The study of personal values can provide greater insight into the entirety of human behaviour. Therefore, it has been studied concerning a variety of disciplines including education. Although there are a limited number of educational studies dealing with values, attempting to explore the relationship between personal values and learning approaches, personal values and academic achievement, influence of one’s personal values on learning community and vice versa and value education are important trends that emerged in educational research. Those studies mainly focused on identifying students’ preferred learning approaches at different stages of academic life and underlying values that are likely to influence the preference. In addition, the positive and negative behaviours of the underlying values with the learning approaches over time and the changes were aimed at. When concerned with the learning approaches that are found frequently in studies, the deep, surface, achieving and strategic approaches are prominent. According to Wilding and Andrews [ 43 ], the two main approaches to studying are the deep approach and the surface approach, as distinguished by several researchers. In addition, an achieving or strategic approach employs either deep or surface strategies, depending on the demands of the task. Contrastingly, Matthews et al. [ 3 ] and Lietz and Matthews [ 27 ] cite Biggs [ 29 ], and he has specified three distinct approaches to learning, namely, The Surface, The Deep and The Achieving approaches to learning. The classification of Biggs’ [ 29 ] learning approaches appeared in many of the studies related to personal values, learning approaches and academic achievements. Research by Matthews et al. and Lietz et al. [ 3 , 27 , 37 ] based on personal values and their effect on students’ preference for learning approaches have revealed similar relationships and their changes over time, mainly related to the underlying values along with the other factors. In fact, revealing the correlation among value, learning approach and academic achievement is extremely important for educational practices. However, as they conclude, there is no consistency in those changes, and it has been further revealed that one learning approach is influenced by several value attributes. In general, deep and strategic learning approaches are found to be positively related to the academic achievement of successful students, whereas the surface learning approach is reported with less successful students. Self-direction and achievement values were identified as the most influential in students’ success through the above approaches. Collectively, the above study results offer potential insights that may be useful when designing new academic courses or in any teaching-learning intervention. Furthermore, though personal values are not the sole determinant of educational or career choice, the correct understanding of values is useful in addressing the arising needs and issues in any discipline. Especially to address a wide range of issues relating to schooling and any educational outcomes such as academic achievement, retention, participation, dropping out, discipline and career selection.

With regard to today’s transforming society, value education has identified a crucially important requirement. Both the cognitive and affective domains of a child need to be developed through education. Kunduroglu and Babadogan [ 53 ] stressed that the purpose of education is to furnish students with affective behaviours. Mainly, schools and other educational institutions are the places where students continue their value education process, which begins at home. One of the objectives of values education in schools is to develop a healthy, consistent and balanced personality in students [ 16 ]. In that sense, formal educational interventions are better focused on enhancing the values that children have already started to develop and help children to reflect, understand and implement their own values accordingly. At this point, direct or indirect inclusion of themes such as moral, religious, civic, democratic, national, personal and social goals and issues in the school curricula has been stressed as important. Furthermore, the need of treating value education as a high priority in terms of ensuring the continuity of society and cultural transmission at a personal level also highlighted in many studies. The effectiveness of curricula including value education has been studied several times, and the results revealed the robust links between value education, student disciplinary conduct and academic achievements. Additionally, the consideration given to the respective roles of formal and informal education, learning communities, peers, parents and other institutions and agencies in making sense of values and forming personal values is emphasized in much of the value-education-based research.

Another concept that emerged as important in the dimension of personal values is its close relationship with the learning community and vice versa. The peer group influence on shaping academic behaviour and personal behaviour have long been studied by scholars over different perspectives. Concerning that, many researchers have focused on cooperative/collaborative learning interventions as the means of establishing social relationships and value development.

In general, when analysing the contents of research studies, it was notable that research related to personal values and learning approaches have been the major focus of many scholars in comparison to the other directions. A few studies found online databases discussing the relationship between personal values and academic achievement. Study reports directly focusing on the correlation of personal values and learning community and vice versa and the importance of personal values as a part of academic life are found lacking in online databases. Methodologically, it was found that many of the studies tend to apply mixed method designs and only a few have taken qualitative and quantitative research as their main research method. Other than that, literature-based reports are also available as useful academic resources. In the data collection process, questionnaires and interviews were found as the most commonly used instruments.

The discussion of personal values includes many distinct dimensions and can be approached through numerous perspectives: education, personal and social life, professional world, culture, political, religion and so on. It is realized that focusing only on a part of it cannot result in a holistic study of the concept but still it would be important to understand the depth of the concept. Depending on online resource availability and the time period set for the selection of resources for the current review may have resulted in the exclusion of some valuable research outcomes and directions. However, the comparative analysis based on available literature would probably shed light on the variety of interpretations, findings and research tendencies.

Finally, as the research literature reveals, the insight gained through the results of value-related studies facilitate the clear identification of the role of value in personal life and partly as a deciding factor of academic life. If one is not clear of his or her own values, then he/she is not clear with aims and is ineffective in controlling their life. Hence, further investigation on value-related topics over the wide range of its interrelated dimensions would give a more holistic and profound view of the role of personal values in education.

6. Recommendations

Based on the above discussion, it is apparent that still there is much room for future research studies on the theme of personal values since they affect all the avenues of human life, individually or in common as a group or a community. Conversely, several factors influence personal values and their changes. Therefore, a detailed further examination of the complex interplay of factors influencing personal values and how personal values influence an individual and in common to the whole human community seems to be valuable.

According to the analyses presented in this article, it is implied that the topic of personal values is very much important in the field of education to identify students’ behaviours, life goals and expectations, learning styles and how these change over time. Furthermore, increased attention is given to value education since values are considered as essential social or soft skills that one must acquire and practice in the 21st century world. Therefore, education, regardless of the level of junior, secondary, tertiary or professional, should aim at making human life better not only through professional or economic enhancement but also through social, moral and spiritual strengthening. At present, schools and other educational providers have adopted several co-curricular programmes that uplift values in students, such as peer support systems, community service projects and student action teams. These interventions provide students with opportunities to develop a sense of responsibility, empathy, unity, appreciation of others and their views, lifestyles and cultures and work with others to resolve the problems. These programmes have been recorded with notable achievements. This is a common feature of almost all the educational contexts that ensure values are incorporated into teaching programmes across the key learning areas to develop students’ civic and social skills. Thus, there is a need for a realistic and balanced curriculum in which the programs that inspire the value acquisition and internalisation of socially beneficial skills and behaviours are emphasized. In addition, the integration of such features into the disciplines in the curriculum is also important. Along with that, research studies to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses and the positive and negative aspects of such programmes need to be continued. According to the general and most practiced procedure, during or at the end of the academic experience, cognitive behaviours are always tested, but testing effective behaviours is always neglected. Hence, it is a noteworthy point to mention the importance of assessing processes for the progress of value development in students.

Finally, the current study based on the available literature has shown that students probably tend to adjust their approaches to a specific learning strategy due to several factors: learning environment, subject area, expectations, curriculum, teacher and teaching style, origin and cultural context, gender, religion, etc. Furthermore, there is no significant pattern of selecting learning approaches such as deep, surface or achieving, etc., at different levels of the context of learning. Therefore, deep study into how learning approaches are changed, on what basis and what the most influential motives for such alterations are will be beneficial to understanding students’ learning behaviours. Hence, research studies further investigating such dimensions would probably useful and needed at present and in future.

Author Contributions

Conceptualisation, K.A.A.G.; methodology, D.M.S.C.P.K.D. and K.A.A.G.; formal analysis, D.M.S.C.P.K.D. and S.Y.E.; investigation, D.M.S.C.P.K.D. and K.A.A.G.; resources, K.A.A.G.; writing—original draft preparation, D.M.S.C.P.K.D.; writing—review and editing, K.A.A.G.; supervision, K.A.A.G. and S.Y.E.; project administration, K.A.A.G. and S.Y.E. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Recognizing the Value of Educational Research

A recent survey shows that research on teaching and learning is not valued at many AACSB-accredited schools across the U.S. and Canada.
One reason that business schools might not recognize research on teaching and learning is that the journal quality lists they commonly use to assess faculty intellectual contributions focus primarily on discipline-based scholarship.
STEM fields already place equal value on research on teaching and learning within individual disciplines. By following their lead, two Canadian scholars argue, business schools will enrich their students’ learning experiences.

If business educators were asked to define the purpose of business schools, they likely would emphasize the need to “prepare the next generation of leaders.” But if this is the case, why do so few business schools prioritize research that advances teaching and curricular design?

Researcher Sanobar Siddiqui first explored this question as the subject of her doctoral dissertation. “One of my thesis findings was that the tenure system’s lack of rewards impedes business academics from pursuing research in teaching and learning,” she explains.

Now an assistant professor of accounting at the University of Regina’s Faculty of Business Administration in Canada, Siddiqui wanted to learn why so many business schools do not value research on teaching and learning (RoTL). This response is puzzling, she says, given that Standard 7 of the AACSB Business Accreditation Standards accepts “scholarship of teaching and learning” as documentation to indicate a business school’s teaching effectiveness and impact.

She and Camillo Lento, a professor with the Faculty of Business Administration at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, published a paper on the status of RoTL in the April 2022 edition of the International Journal of Educational Management . The paper’s findings are based on a survey in which Siddiqui and Lento asked educators two questions:

How do AACSB-accredited business schools in the U.S. and Canada define “teaching effectiveness,” according to AACSB’s Standard 7?
Do these schools consider research on teaching and learning in their promotion and tenure decisions?

This topic is particularly important, says Siddiqui, because business schools serve such diverse student audiences. Moreover, learner success is integral to every business school’s mission. Many of the instructional strategies “that we use in class are not research-informed or evidence-based. Hence, we are shortchanging our students,” she says. “Our teaching needs to catch up with the changes we see in our classroom.”

‘A Last Priority’

Siddiqui and Lento received 78 responses to their survey; in the second phase of their study, they conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 educators in the U.S. and Canada.

Among survey respondents, 42 percent noted that they were “unaware of an explicit teaching effectiveness definition” at their schools, but 58 percent said the policies in place at their schools communicated “an implied definition.” Only one respondent could quote a definition of teaching effectiveness from the school’s website.

Respondents noted a lack of “perceived respect and value” for RoTL, describing this line of scholarship as “a last priority” at their schools. As one educator put it, “Our department does not really care about teaching as long as you are cranking out strong scholarship.”

Schools that consider educational research for tenure and faculty qualification tend to focus on journal quality alone, not on whether published articles are discipline-based.

The good news is that 55 percent of respondents noted that their schools did take RoTL into account when making tenure decisions. Siddiqui and Lento found that these schools have two things in common. First, they focus on journal quality alone for the purposes of tenure and faculty qualification, not on whether faculty’s published articles are discipline-based.

Second, these schools are more likely to consider RoTL when faculty include this work “as part of a larger research plan that includes discipline-based research.” Only faculty following teaching tracks are likely to receive tenure based solely on publications in education-focused journals.

Additionally, teaching-oriented schools are more likely than research-oriented schools to recognize RoTL. While this makes outward sense, Siddiqui wonders why prolific faculty who produce innovative scholarship on pedagogical issues that are critical to business education cannot “be hired, promoted, and awarded just like discipline-based researchers” at research-oriented institutions.

What Perpetuates the Stigma?

Siddiqui and Lento point to several factors that could be driving the lack of recognition of RoTL among AACSB-accredited schools:

No consensus about teaching quality. Although many individual educational institutions have defined teaching effectiveness based on existing research, business schools have not yet established a shared definition of what constitutes effective teaching. However, the co-authors emphasize, more dedicated research could produce findings that inspire a common language around teaching and learning.

The complex nature of determining teaching quality. Schools often evaluate the quality of faculty’s research by whether the work appears in academic journals that are rated highly by certain journal quality lists . However, they find they cannot use a similar approach to evaluate the quality of faculty’s teaching, says Lento. “The evaluation of teaching effectiveness is much more complex and requires many more sources of information, possibly compiled into a teaching dossier that is unique to an educator.”

A lack of attention in business doctoral programs. Most doctoral programs train young researchers to study topics related to their disciplines of choice. As a result of this early training, RoTL “may come with a stigma as it is outside of traditional discipline-specific research,” Lento says.

Lento admits that the reasons listed above are speculative. He and Siddiqui would like to see other researchers conduct follow-up studies that take deeper dives into the broader stigma surrounding RoTL.

Changing Mindsets, Taking Action

In the meantime, Siddiqui and Lento call on business school administrators and faculty to work together to create a “shared and precise definition of teaching effectiveness.” Educators can start by defining teaching quality within their own institutions.

From there, Siddiqui and Lento say that schools can take any or all the following actions to change mindsets about RoTL:

Set appropriate objectives, incentives, and evaluation mechanisms.
Create and nurture communities of practice that help like-minded faculty pursue research focused on solving issues they face in their classrooms.
Consider weighing education research in peer-reviewed articles more heavily, particularly for faculty in teaching-focused roles.
Recognize RoTL for accreditation and tenure and normalize it as a legitimate form of scholarship.
Make seed funds available to faculty who pursue RoTL.
Give awards and incentives to faculty who use research-informed teaching in their classrooms.
Consider hiring tenure-track academics who also are expert educators with an expressed interest in pursuing RoTL. These scholars can investigate and develop “research-informed teaching tools ready to be put into practice in almost any business classroom,” says Siddiqui. This outcome, she emphasizes, is an indication of how RoTL contributes to the advancement of business disciplines.
Encourage and teach RoTL in doctoral programs, with the aim of improving and advancing the quality of teaching at business schools.

Siddiqui points out that information on the websites of AACSB-accredited schools “are replete with research centers, research chairs and scholars, core research focus areas, research awards, annual research celebration reports, intellectual contributions, and grant-funding awards.”

There is no reason, she says, that schools could not also highlight information about their teaching philosophies, teaching awards, student feedback, educational leadership and professional development, and faculty research on teaching and learning.

Two B-School Perspectives

So far, Siddiqui and Lento’s paper has captured the attention of other like-minded educators in the business school community. This includes Nicola Charwat, associate dean of teaching and learning and senior lecturer of business law and taxation at Monash University’s Monash Business School (MBS) in Caulfield East, Australia.

MBS prioritizes scholarship on teaching and learning (SoTL) where appropriate, she says, through efforts that include identifying quality education-oriented journals and valuing publication in those journals equally to publication in discipline-based journals. The school uses “a consultative process” to identify journals specializing in teaching and learning that are equivalent to discipline-based journals rated as A*, A, B, and C on the quality list compiled by the Australian Business Deans Council.

“We have also instituted a Business Education and Research Group, which has been awarding both practice- and research-output-focused grants to staff for three years,” Charwat says. “Alongside these efforts, of course, there are moves in the university in line with the broader trend of raising the profile of teaching and ensuring its status is on par with other work of the university.”

Educators in STEM disciplines have long recognized educational research in tenure decisions and regularly reward academics who pursue RoTL in their disciplines.

Despite these changes, Charwat notes that the perception remains that accomplishments related to educational research are “somehow lesser” than those related to discipline-related scholarship. Additionally, many faculty remain uncertain about how to approach educational research. In response, MBS has built communities of practice dedicated to teaching and is now working “to increase awareness of and opportunities to undertake SoTL and education research,” Charwat says.

Charwat says that the questions raised in Siddiqui and Lento’s paper are “essential” to business education, and that their article “has prompted us to start exploring the patterns of our own SoTL and education research.” MBS faculty, she adds, might also pursue a similar study focused on AACSB-accredited schools in Australia.

Another educator who read the article with interest is Martin Lockett, former dean and professor of strategic management at Nottingham University Business School China (NUBS China) in Zhejiang. Lockett explains that NUBS China uses the Academic Journal Guide , which is produced by the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS), to support tenure decisions and to classify faculty under AACSB accreditation standards.

But in the CABS guide, only four journals focused on teaching and learning are rated as 3, 4, or 4*, which are the targets that NUBS China uses to qualify faculty as Scholarly Academics under AACSB accreditation or for internal recognition of quality research, Lockett says.

This has led to worry among the school’s teaching-oriented faculty that if they focus on RoTL, they risk being classified as “additional faculty,” unless they can consistently publish in the few education-focused journals listed by CABS. That concern, Lockett says, deters most faculty from pursuing RoTL in any substantial way.

While this scenario is all too common at institutions with research-focused missions, it is not mandated by AACSB accreditation standards, emphasizes Stephanie Bryant, AACSB’s chief accreditation officer. She clarifies that whether a business school considers educational scholarship for the purpose of accreditation or tenure is its choice, based on the parameters it has set for its individual mission. “The standards do not say anywhere, or imply, that educational research is not valued,” Bryant stresses. The devaluation of RoTL, she adds, “is a school perspective.”

Time to ‘Balance the Scales’

The stigma surrounding RoTL at AACSB-accredited business schools could be lifted, say Siddiqui and Lento, if administrators acknowledge the benefits that fostering cultures of teaching and learning bring to all business school stakeholders. These advantages include a wider scope of scholarship and more evidence-based pedagogical tools for faculty, richer learning experiences and better learning outcomes for students, and more well-rounded job candidates for employers.

Educators in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines already know this, says Siddiqui. STEM departments have long recognized educational research in tenure decisions and regularly reward academics who pursue RoTL in their disciplines.

As one example, Siddiqui points to Carl Edwin Wieman, winner of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize in Physics. Wieman established the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative at the University of British Columbia in Canada to encourage evidence-based teaching methods focused on improving undergraduate science education. Since its inception, the initiative has hired fellows who are interested in conducting education research, particularly based in the disciplines in which they have earned their doctorates. It also has inspired the creation of teaching materials in science education, a dedicated website, and a sister initiative at the University of Colorado Boulder in the United States.

Business schools, says Siddiqui, could achieve comparable results by raising awareness of the importance of RoTL, disseminating RoTL findings beyond peer-reviewed journals, and driving research-informed teaching methods that advance business education.

This year, the co-authors published a second paper that finds that scholarly and practice academics who developed rigorous research skills in their doctoral programs and who publish discipline-based research are more likely to pursue RoTL research. Here, Siddiqui and Lento more directly call on business school deans to reward and incentivize this line of research by creating communities of practice and expanding their journal ranking frameworks to include relevant peer-reviewed publications.

It is imperative, Siddiqui and Lento argue, that business schools place studies based on classroom settings on equal footing with studies based on corporate settings. “Research on teaching and learning balances the scales,” Siddiqui says, “by utilizing evidence-based, efficient, and effective teaching to foster deep learning amongst diverse student audiences.”

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